17.03.2023
It is I, the Absolute Madman and I'm back with your weekly dose of Stranded! But first, my weekly dose of comments!:
n1ght4ury20 - I'll do my best!
deathdog08 - That feeling when instead of trying to figure out what's going to happen next in your favorite story you're thinking of what you'd have written in the author's stead.
Guest - Yui is for sure a pokemon trainer, cause she got those jiggly puffs you feel me?
DeltaWolf2038 - Mayonnaise in an elevator! It's heading upstairs so it'll see you later!
And now, the chapter!:
A month had passed since Izuku and Shiozaki teamed up to plant some grass and secure a stable source of food. The initial workload was quite heavy since neither of them had much experience in farming, but that didn't stop them and their efforts were rewarded. Caring for the crops, watering them and simply witnessing their rapid growth was not only a satisfying task to do besides their usual duties, but also a great bonding experience for the duet. Izuku got to witness Shiozaki's more passionate side on a couple of occasions and was also able to learn a few things about her.
Their adventure was nearing its end once the crops started maturing and it was soon time to harvest them. It wasn't going to be an easy task however so the entire group got together and decided to put their foraging operations on hold for now - since there weren't that many foragables left anyway - and focus solely on aiding Izuku and Shiozaki during the harvest.
Izuku and Kendo were assigned to do most of the heavy lifting whilst the others were delegated to more dexterous tasks like plucking grapes off the grapevines and moving small volumes of crops.
Despite their farm plots being quite modest in terms of size, the amount of crops they harvested wasn't modest at all. Even with the help of their baskets and Izu/Kendo hauling duo it took them one entire day just to cut/pluck/dig everything and another one to haul everything to the hole in the wall that they used to store their food.
Only once they were done with the harvest completely did they suddenly realize something that they should've thought of ahead of time.
"There's no way we can just leave it here like that, right?" Tokage was the first one to speak up as the group stood in front of the literal pile of assorted crops.
Since everything they were gathering up till now was berries and roots, no one thought about making their food stock organized or even sheltered from the elements, because they were constantly bringing back fresh food and making sure to eat what they already had so that it wouldn't decay on them.
Now though things would be very different. The circulation of food would be much less radical and fluent, and now they had a much higher variety of crops to store on top of that!
"Yeah, leaving it like that doesn't seem like a good idea." Mina agreed with the green-haired gossiper.
"If only we'd thought about it sooner!" Momo exclaimed, frustration evident in her features.
"Well, I'm pretty sure we can still do something about it. It's not like everything is going to go bad in a day or two, right?" Kyouka stepped in to bring some optimism to the conversation.
"Jirou is right." Kendo stated with confidence. "Even if we had thought about making this into an actual storehouse earlier, there's no way of telling whether or not we'd have enough manpower to do something about it as we still had to forage up till now. Now that we have enough food to last us for a couple of weeks we could dedicate all of our efforts towards resolving this problem as soon as possible." She explained and the group ended up agreeing with her logic.
"I believe the fruits and vegetables of our labor should be able to withstand the elements for some time without any shelter whatsoever." Shiozaki confirmed.
"It's decided then, let's build ourselves a storage!" Izuku exclaimed and the girls cheered.
Now that they could put their hearts and minds to it the group was dead set on blitzing through the construction. Izuku and Momo already had some experience with building stuff, so their expertise was sure to speed the process up by a large margin.
Momo had been ordered to stay behind and draw plans for the storeroom, a task perfect for her as she already had a few things on her mind. Shuusa, Mina and Tokage joined forces with Shiozaki who was tasked with replanting their crops and expanding their fields if possible. Kodai, Kyouka and Tooru were scouring the immediate area around their hidden valley in search of clay which Momo deemed necessary for their current project. And lastly Izuku and Kendo headed out to cut down some trees and gather wood which would no doubt be the main material for not only their current endeavor but also any future undertakings.
It sounded simply enough, but there was a catch. The forest surrounding their hidden valley was old, very old, ancient even! And as you'd expect from a forest as old as this one, all the trees were quite thick which made them tough to cut down, hence why both Izuku and Kendo were tasked with procuring wood as either of them on their own would surely run themselves ragged without making any substantial progress whatsoever. With their powers combined however, the chances of them actually succeeding grew immensely.
They had only one axe, but it was the one that Momo fashioned out of Element a long time ago. The very same that refused to lose its edge despite all the abuse it had already experienced.
Finding the ideal tree to cut down wasn't hard as nearly all of them looked identically and only the giant ones really stood out from the rest. Izuku and Kendo settled on chopping one of the trees immediately next to one of the entrances to the hidden valley to minimize the future travel distance.
With the tree marked for sacrifice, an axe in hand and resolve on their faces, Izuku and Kendo got to work, taking turns swinging the axe into the trunk, hacking away entire chunks of wood at a time. Woodcutting is no easy task however and even with all of their training they couldn't keep going at it forever.
They were about a fifth of the way through when they decided to take a quick break as they needed some time to regain more of their stamina than they could do whilst switching places all the time.
"That's gotta be the toughest tree I've ever tried to cut." Izuku said when he was eventually able to catch his breath, though his voice was still husky.
"No kidding." Kendo responded, her breathing labored as well. "At least we were able to make some progress." She pointed out as she wiped the sweat from her forehead.
"It'll take some time, but we'll definitely be able to make it fall." Izuku agreed and stood up as he fanned himself, a vibrant blush of exertion covering his face. "Damn if it isn't hot though." He commented as the heat made their task a lot harder.
"Yeah, I could've sworn it wasn't that hot when we first started." Kendo realized as her face was lit up by an equally intensive blush. "Should we get back to-" She was about to ask something, but the words died in her throat when she looked up.
Izuku had decided that enough was enough and taken his shirt off, exposing his chiseled, sweat-covered body to the world - and the girl next to him - his perfectly outlined muscles flexing and relaxing as he stretched himself before going back to work.
Kendo, normally cool and level-headed, was left fidgeting in place as her eyes darted over every single muscle she could see - and there were a lot of them! - her thoughts going rogue and running rampant, flooding her mind with images completely unrelated to the task she was supposed to be doing right now. She rubbed her thighs together as something really unwelcome began stirring inside of her. Kendo had already seen a lot of well-built guys, but there was something about the combination of Izuku's gentle personality and his sculpted body that seemed to really do it for her.
"I want to touch them so badly!" Kendo panicked mentally as she tried to shake the thoughts out of her head. "We need to wrap this up quickly. I have no idea how long I'll be able to hold myself back!"
Whilst Izuku was busy hacking away at the tree and unknowingly torturing Kendo with his physique, his girlfriends had decided to hold a council as Mina and Tooru had some news to share with Kyouka and Momo.
"So what you're saying is that Tokage is interested in Izuku?" Momo summed up once Mina wrapped up her story.
"That's right. She said so herself." Tooru assured with a firm nod.
"And you didn't tell us right away because?" Kyouka prompted, visibly annoyed.
"Plot reasons." Both Mina and Tooru responded in perfect sync.
"Plot reasons?" Kyouka and Momo echoed in confusion.
"Plot reasons." Mina and Tooru confirmed, not clearing up anything at all and causing the other two to simply drop the case then and there. "It's all in the past so let's focus on the here and now, alright?" Mina proposed.
"I guess we should decide what to do about this unexpected development…" Momo mused out in agreement. "Well, hoping that Izuku didn't draw the attention of people from outside our class was probably stupid with how much he's been putting himself out there, but I never suspected that he could have fans in Itsuka's class."
"Yeah. Finding out that the four of us had a crush on him was unexpected, but not that weird. We've known him for a long while already and I can't really count the amount of times he's come to our aid. I'm sure he doesn't have anything against class B, but he's not close friends with any of them, right?" Jirou voiced her thoughts on the matter, prompting Momo to try and confirm something.
"Could it be that we're just overreacting?" Momo questioned and the conversation ground to a halt.
"What do you mean?" Mina wondered.
"Well, from what Itsuka had told me about Tokage she's a massive tease and a bit of a flirt, so it could be possible that she's not interested in Izuku in a romantic way." Momo explained and the other girls had to agree that the logic seemed quite sound.
"So what you're saying is that she might only be interested in a quick fuck and not dating?" Tooru crudely stated, prompting a blush to explode on Momo's face.
"W-Well, I wouldn't use such a vulgar term, but that could be the case." Momo confirmed as she tried to fan the blush from her face.
"If that were the case then we have nothing to worry about. I doubt Greenie would agree even if Tokage was to walk up and lay her cards out on the table." Kyouka said with relief.
"On the subject of casual hook ups - I'm pretty sure that Kodai's been giving him the 'fuck me' eyes ever since you guys came back from that expedition." Tooru dropped a bomb out of the blue.
"'Again, why are you telling us this only just now?" Kyouka questioned in exasperation.
"Plot reasons baby!"
"I should've known…" The petite rocker groaned out and massaged her temples, already feeling the incoming headache.
"Come to think of it - don't you guys think that Izuku and Shiozaki had grown a lot closer over the past month?" Momo suddenly chimed in with yet another worrying observation. "I mean, she was pretty vigilant around him, but they seem to have bonded during their work. This time I'm completely sure that Shiozaki has no feelings for Izuku, but this trend itself is pretty worrying."
"And to top it all off he is now all alone with Kendo and they are doing purely physical work. You know, the kind where our Greek god of a boyfriend gets to show off all of that hunk that he's got?" Mina drove the final nail into the coffin.
Silence surrounded the councilwomen as they digested all of this information. It started off with one girl having the hots for a one-time fling with their boyfriend and escalated to the point where they now have four rivals! Needless to say, the council would certainly have to reconvene at a later date and thoroughly discuss this unexpected, but possibly welcome, turn of events.
It took some time - and more than a few close calls - but the tree eventually gave in and fell to the ground. Conveniently enough Momo had just finished scribbling some crude plans for their storehouse, so Izuku and Kendo could start cutting the giant trunk into usable materials.
With some more trial and error they were able to discover the most efficient way of stripping the bark and hacking the trunk into the parts needed for the construction. It was still however quite the hard task and so it took them an entire day and a bit to get it done.
Kodai, Kyouka and Tooru had managed to locate a vast clay deposit which would surely last them for quite some time, so with her previous task cleared Kendo was delegated to help the trio in hauling the clay back to camp. It was around this time that Momo started thinking about building a warehouse for their construction materials and other miscellaneous stuffs, but she was well aware that they should focus on their current project first.
Once the wood was processed and dragged into the safe confines of their base Izuku found himself without a job. That wouldn't be for long however as Momo was already on standby, waiting for him with a shovel and a task.
Apparently she had quite the innovative design for the food store. Instead of building a wooden shack or anything of the sort, Momo planned on digging a hole in the ground and making it kind of like a cellar, though a part of it would still be above ground.
With nothing else to do Izuku grabbed the shovel and started outlining the dimensions of the food store by following Momo's directions. Thankfully the shovel was also made out of Element so no amount of extensive use would be able to damage it. It certainly was a good thing as the ground around the construction site was way tougher than Izuku expected. Still, with enough dedication and brute force Izuku was eventually able to start making some progress on digging the diggy diggy hole. It wasn't something that could be done in a single day mind you, especially when Momo seemed to go a bit overboard with the amount of storage space during the designing process. Still, it was probably a better idea to make it bigger right now instead of struggling to expand it in the future.
Once Izuku dug out the space for their cellar/food store, it was time to begin the construction in earnest.
The first thing they'd done was place four wooden pillars in the corners of the hole which would be holding up the roof and a few more wooden supports in between the corners to make sure that it doesn't end up collapsing in on itself. After the skeleton was done it was time to start working on the floor. They could just smooth it out and leave it as dirt or even use the clay to act as a barrier between the ground and the interior of the stockpile, but Momo had a better idea.
She had Izuku cut what remained of the giant trunk into planks which they'd lay down and bind together with the natural glue that Momo, Mina and Izuku had discovered around a year ago to act as a proper floor. It was probably the most work-intensive option, but once the floor was in they couldn't help but think that it was the right call to go for a wooden floor.
Going up from the floor it was time to add some structure to the walls. Several beams connecting the support pillars together were put in place to add even more stability to the entire thing and act as a good reference for when they start filling in the walls themselves.
The copious amounts of clay that Kendo had hauled back was an excellent material to make the walls out of so that's what they did. Their work was interrupted a couple of times when certain troublemakers grew a bit bored and decided to chuck the clay at their friends, but aside from that not much happened.
The only thing left at this point was the roof, which was already made and needed only be put in its place. It was a wooden frame, just slightly larger than the outline of the foot store itself, with planks nailed onto it. That would probably not be enough to keep all of the water out, but that's where Izuku's pride came to the rescue.
Shuusa had been able to create a sealant glue which not only caused the planks to hold together more firmly, but also made the entire roof watertight, meaning they wouldn't have to worry about getting their supplies wet! Needless to say there was much rejoicing.
"It looks better than I expected it to be honest." Tokage stated once they were done and able to appreciate the fruits of their labor.
"I think it's safe to say that if the entire hero industry was to ever collapse we could always start a construction business." Mina joked and the entire group laughed, even Kodai couldn't stop the corners of her mouth from twitching upwards.
"Alright, let's get all the food hauled to the stockpile and then we can go and celebrate." Kendo ordered and the group cheered before getting to work.
With so much manpower and their ever growing expertise it was only just a matter of time before they'd be able to afford some more permanent accommodations instead of bunking in the tents in pairs. Hell, Shuusa was even bunking with either Kyouka and Momo or Mina and Tooru all the time and Izuku was still sleeping outside!
The girls were well aware of that and so it wouldn't be long before that situation would have to change.
They about to build a love hotel ngl.
Have a great day and I'll catch y'all in the next update!