Tomboy Island

“I’d like you to expand and build more shelters, maybe get a basic oven going… we’ll probably need clay for that though. Can’t do proper insulation with dirt alone. I’ll keep a lookout.”

“How do you even make a clay oven?” Ashley asked.

“It's basically just a mostly enclosed space made from clay, it’s not complicated,” Alex assured her. “Once we have one, we can bake some basic tableware, but I am repeating myself. I trust your ingenuity to figure out ways to expand the camp. I’d like to sleep under some cover tonight.”

“Just bring back a tiger hide and that won’t be an issue,” Valeria drily joked.

“I’ll try my best,” Alex promised, laughter under his sincerity.

With that, he stood up and sat out, Tess and Charlotte swift to follow him. “The classic trio,” Charlotte declared. “Together again at last.”

Tess rolled her eyes, “It was only the three of us for half a day.”

“It was that first night, that fateful night,” Charlotte retorted, then scratched the top of her head. “Whatever the island is doing, it’s not preventing everything annoying. There’s some itchy matting going on.”

“My hair is fine,” Tess said.

“Lucky you - and you somehow seem to get paler despite the weather.”

Alex chuckled at their banter, but did not join. He had to put his mind to picking a direction.

Following the cost to the south-east was the reasonable decision here. The water had retreated along it, making much of the muddy shore traversable. “This island must be affected by some weird currents,” Alex said.

“Yeah,” Charlotte agreed.

“What do you mean?” Tess asked.

“The ebb and flow cycle is all out of whack,” the swimming ace answered. “I’ve been keeping lose track of it and its, like, totally random? Seems like there is very little rhyme or reason to it.”

“You pay attention to things?” Tess asked.

“Ha-ha.” Charlotte laughed drily. “The olympic swimmer is only good for her holes, ha-ha. I’ll let you know, gym manager, that I pay attention to plenty of stuff!”

“Yes, but most of it seems to be my breasts and his dick,” Tess pointed out.

“I can empathize with one of those,” Alex confessed, barely managing to not stare at Tess’ breasts before it became a rising issue.

The beach was simple terrain. Yes, they risked exposure to the sun here, but it was much easier to navigate than the jungle and allowed them to get to the hitherto unknown parts of the island much quicker and with less risk. The cool mud between his toes made the daystar bearable.

“Alex!” Charlotte shouted. “The ground!”

The warning came quick enough. The leader of the small group stopped, then jumped backwards when a bit of the mud before him stirred. Two thick tendrils reached for where his foot would have been in a moment.

Failing to secure a grab, the creature rose from the mud before them. It was another one of the giant starfish, lumbering forwards on four tendrils, while using a fifth as its eyestalk. That it was the second time Alex ran into this kind of animal did not make it any less alien.

The group distanced themselves a few more metres. The range of their legs outpaced this thing easily. Alex scanned the environment for any others of its kind. If there were, they remained similarly hidden in the mud.

Alex had a simple choice here: fly or fight. Both ran the risk of stirring hidden enemies. The former had the additional risk of leaving one of these clearly hostile creatures near the camp. ‘Unless I was wrong and this thing isn’t actually dangerous?’ he wondered. ‘I could try letting it touch me…’

He looked at its slimy hide.

That felt like a terrible idea.

Alex considered it. He considered it for longer than probably was sane. ‘What if it is just friendly?’ the man of the island wondered and stepped back another half stride. ‘What if we can live in harmony and I am killing these things needlessly?’

The starfish reared, revealing a set of five flat teeth at the centre of its underside.

‘Oh hell no.’

Alex dashed to the side. The creature tried to switch which one of its limbs served as the eyestalk to keep up with him, but it was less than halfway through the motion before he was behind it. Hands together, he brought them down like a fist on the oversized marine creature.

A pitiful squelching sound accompanied the forceful expulsion of slime and saltwater out of its hollow body. Alex did not leave it there, smashing first each of the ocular, then the centre of the creature until it stopped moving.

“Fucking ew,” Charlotte commented.

“Ew is right,” Alex grunted and washed his hands in a shallow puddle of saltwater. “Feels like punching a halfway filled waterskin.”

“At least they die quickly,” Tess said.

“That they do,” Alex agreed.

They continued on with more care but were not accosted any further for this stretch of the beach.

They went further east from there, following the shoreline. They were barely past the ‘peak’ of this segment of the shore when they spotted good news in the distance.

This part of the shore was largely made out of grassy stretches and soil, occasionally interrupted by a trickling river from somewhere inland. Among that green and brown was a pronounced blotch of red. Red that appeared firm from a distance, yet glistened wet.

It was clay.

“One to two hours away from camp, that’s pretty lucky.” Alex knelt down in the middle of the over deposit. Some of it was baked by the sun, making it hard to the touch. He knew just enough about clay to be aware that this hardness was different from the proper firm tableware that could be made from the raw material being exposed to proper heat. It also was largely pure, sparing them a bothersome filtering process.

“Is that lucky?” Tess questioned. “It’s quite a walk.”

“Back and forth up to eight times day,” Alex said. “Enthusiastic, considering they’ll be carrying chunks of clay, but we don’t need that much. We’ll beat it into a powder, then turn it into a workable mud with water. It’s perfectly doable.”

“Definitely beats sitting around all day,” Charlotte commented.

“I suppose you are right in that sense,” Tess agreed. “Do we head back and tell them about it?”

A good question, one that Alex hesitated to answer. The sooner they going on getting that clay oven going, the better. It will take a long time to dry out properly. At the same time, there was likely only one segment of coast left to explore - unless they were going to find a narrow land bridge all of a sudden.

They did not find a narrow land bridge. In fact, they found a whole lot of nothing, besides confirmation that this was indeed a small island with another island of unknown size a good distance away. Maybe there were even more.

“I hope everyone crashed here,” Alex said, while they stood at the shore. They had effectively finished the loop, so there was no point in wandering any further north, unless he felt like patrolling for the missing passengers. “Would be messy if some of them were over there.”

“I hope all of them survived,” Tess added.

“I’m feeling pretty confident on that,” Charlotte said. “I mean, Ashley managed to get ashore and she’s by far the most petite out of all of us. They’re out there, somewhere, nude and eating fruit or something.”

“Probably,” Alex agreed.

The sound of gentle waves was all that filled the air for a moment.

“So, Master,” Tess raised her voice. “I heard you are a seventh son?”

“Overheard me and Yahui talking?” Alex guessed, to a nod on her side. “Naughty girl, eavesdropping on your owner.”

Tess waved off. The whole ‘owner’ spiel lost much of its impact when they weren’t having sex. It was more of a playful title, certainly more so than ‘Master’ was. Alex felt like he was owner of this harem, but he didn’t have a harem of sex slaves in the same sense that historical figures did. Whatever authority he had over them was purely emotional, not backed by any law or physical force.

“We’ve run down the relationship pipeline at breakneck speed,” Tess said. “Can’t blame for actually learning a bit more about you. Four days ago, I barely knew you existed. Now you’re my Master. I’m pretty happy with that arrangement right now, for a bunch of obvious reasons. I don’t want to stop at good sex and you saving my life though. Who are you?”

“That’s a question,” Alex hummed.

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m actually right with her on this.” Charlotte grabbed Alex’s arm. “Everyone got swept up on all the adrenaline and stuff. I really, really like this though, so let’s not just ride it out. Let’s actually, you know… do the love stuff.”

Alex chuckled and scratched the brunette’s head as a gesture of affection. He did feel the matted spots she had complained about earlier. There were two of them, one on either side of her scalp. When he touched them she went glassy-eyed for a moment. “You like that?”

“I haven’t been able to scratch those spots properly all day,” she sighed.

He continued to scratch her head as he sorted his words. “Full name is Alexander David Romanov-Blacksmith. Yes, those last two are a linked last name.” Both tomboys with him laughed when they heard it. “Yes, I know, I know, random name. My mom liked to joke she married into a family of mongrels. My dad did not care much for that joke. I don’t quite care for the full name. Just Alex works best.”

“Yeah,” Charlotte agreed readily.

“Definitely,” Tess backed her up on that.

“I’m not sure if I qualify as seventh son, but I’m the seventh child. Filthy rich parents, it should be said, but as I told Yahui this morning, I won’t see a penny of that inheritance. The eldest three get everything. I don’t even really know what my family does. It’s always been vaguely stock related.” He awkwardly scratched the back of his head. “Got a good education, private school, and kept on trying to live up to my father’s standards and barely succeeded most of the time.”

“Guess your grades were passing?” Tess asked.

“Funnily enough, he never cared much about my grades,” Alex answered. “That was my mom more than him, although neither of them were ever that deeply invested in my academic career. They encouraged me to do things outdoors, craftsmanship and all of that. They’re a big part of the reason why I got into the survivalist hobby.” He hesitated for a moment. “I can’t tell you much more than that, honestly. I got moved around a lot, so I had a pretty loose social circle. My parents kept being dissatisfied with the schools I went to. Always insisted they were the wrong places for me. Eventually I picked a path in life and that was good enough for them.”

“Honestly sounds like you had pretty bad parents?” Charlotte intonated it as a question, to take the bite out of it.

“Maybe? Can’t say I never felt like they should have spent more time with me, but it also isn’t like they ever were unreasonable or overbearing. They did something right.” Alex gestured at his toned body, then shot both of them a confident smile. 

“They didn’t raise a meek, socially inept loser, that’s for sure,” Tess agreed.

Alex tried to find something else about himself to talk about, but found fairly little. “I think that about sums it up,” he confessed. “Not a very eventful life.”

“I’m sure we can pick some more details out of your brain over the years, Master,” Charlotte said.

To that, he just nodded. “You’re welcome to try. For now, we should get going.”