Today we finally got back to work on building things, and we actually made a ton of progress. Mostly because we started out with breakfast and by hashing things out to make sure we were doing things as best we could.

"If we're going to be making things out of bricks, we need to make sure we're doing things as efficiently as possible," Levy said. "I can make a lot of material with my magic, but using only a fifth of the word for each brick is bad form and it creates a huge amount of byproduct that we can't store, but getting rid of it is wasteful. So before we get started, I need to come up with a new design."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Can I see your phone? It has something I can write with, not just do that typing thing, right?"

"Sure," I said as I opened up a simple art app that was included. The phone was just full of useful little apps like that. I handed her the phone and showed her how to change the brush and how to use the undo feature.

"I know an artist that would kill to have something like this," Levy muttered as she got used to the controls. "I wouldn't have used it much, because in most cases I don't need to micromanage the exact design of my words, but I guess this isn't a usual case."

"Anyone who has used their Word magic like this probably had access to better tools for processing the raw material too," I agreed. "So this is new territory we're exploring."

She smiled at that. "You know, if you put it like that, it makes me a little excited."

Together we brainstormed a lot of ideas and we tweaked how the word was written. As she explained on that first day, so long as it was easily legible, she had a lot of wiggle room in terms of design. After about twenty minutes of work, we came down to something workable.

The letters 'B', 'R', 'I', and 'K' were thick and mostly solid with the barest amounts of material subtracted in order to provide maximum area. Each of them had one completely flat side, were the exact same width, and were more or less structurally sound. The 'K' was a little iffy, but it worked. We could use all four letters in the same wall and it would be secure enough for our purposes. It wasn't great in the long term, but we'd hopefully upgrade it before we had to worry about it collapsing.

However, the 'C' was different, jarringly so. We couldn't get it to act like a very good brick, not while still looking like a 'C'. So we decided to set those aside for the pipe idea I had. They wouldn't be very good pipes considering the one open side, but it would suffice for dumping things without having to personally approach the edge.

But there was still one issue.

"We still don't have a good mortar," I said, causing Levy to grimace. We had been hoping to get one in our first world, and while Pokemon had been a massive boon in a lot of ways, it had been devastatingly sparse on both materials and information we needed for construction.

We had used more clay for the bathtub, but that had required firing it, and while it felt sturdy now, neither of us were certain how well it would do in the long term. For the bath, that was fine, as replacing it with something nicer was an important short term goal. And even for an outhouse it could be fine, since ideally we would want to replace that as well.

But a house? We might end up living in that for months, and it needed to stand up to weather and storms. It falling apart on us would be devastating. And, truth be told, clay might not even work. Clay had to be fired, and it was one thing to fire the inside of a bathtub. Even an outhouse might work. But an entire house? That was too large of an area, and firing the outside would be a herculean task of its own, if it was even possible at all.

"We could wait?" I suggested after a moment of silence. "I know it's better to get it started as soon as possible, but I'd rather delay another week than have it fall apart on us."

Levy's frown worsened. "Maybe for the house, but I'm tired of doing my business over a hole in the ground!" she complained.

We had three pots we could have been using as chamber pots… but all three were put to use. One was for drinking and cooking water, one was holding the blapple seeds we had been collecting, and the last one we had been using for emptying the bath because we still hadn't set up that pipe and didn't want to flood the skyblock each time we took one.

"We'll make a chamber pot first thing," I promised. "Although… I did have a better idea. Tossing it over the edge is fine, but annoying and gross. But plumping of that quality and level is a bit more than we can do right now. But… the multiverse is a big place, and lots of problems have convenient solutions."

Levy looks up at me with curiosity. "What are you thinking?"

I gesture for the phone and she hands it to me. I search through the Catalog app. "As evidenced by the credits we earned for VV and Tinks, it's not just people the Catalog deals in," I explained as I searched. "And I remember one manga that I really enjoyed that had a monster perfect for this. Though 'monster' feels too strong a word." I finally found what I was looking for and angled the phone to Levy.

"Slimes?" she asked, confused. "What kind of monster is that?"

"No slimes in your world?" I asked. "They're a fairly common magical creature. Of course, that just means there are thousands of different types, each world with a unique kind of slime, if not several kinds. Slimes are often viewed as very 'basic', and common evolutions and upgrades for them include elements."

I turned the phone back to me and brought up the information about the slime I had selected, a particular kind from a work called "Isekai Nonbiri Nouka," a pretty simple isekai about a guy who gets transported to another world but all he wants is a healthy body and to farm.

"But these little guys are about as basic as you get. They're known as the 'Janitors of the Forest' and all they do is consume waste. Food waste, human waste, whatever. So all we have to do is dig a hole, throw some of these in, and build a toilet and an outhouse on top of it. They'll take care of the waste, prevent any smells, and we won't have to think about it any more."

"They? Do you think we'll need more than one?"

"No, but they reproduce asexually, based on their 'food supply'. They'll breed to whatever level is needed and self regulate. Really they're incredibly low maintenance. So just two credits for one and we'll be set."

Something so small and weak would normally be a T1, but I guess their cleaning abilities was enough to qualify them for a T2. I wouldn't complain though, as I'd have paid five credits for one.

Levy thought about it for a bit longer and then nodded. "Okay, If we do it like that, then we can attach the bathroom to the main house, so we don't have to run through the rain to use it."

"A good point. But we'll need an outhouse until then. We can make a simple one with one of these guys in there and then transfer him when we finish the house, which might take a couple weeks."

"So we can build the outhouse assuming it will be temporary," Levy mused. "We might be able to use mud as a mortar if it will only be a few weeks…"

"Or we could use wood," I proposed. "Just like we tweaked the letters for a brick, we can do something with wood. If we include as many straight parts as possible, we can get some decent wood planks and chop them to size as needed. Any extra bits we can chop up and use as firewood for the kiln."

Levy grinned. "I think I have just the idea."

Ten more minutes and we had… Well, honestly, it looked like the handwritten version of what would happen if you asked someone to spell the word "Wood" using planks of wood and they didn't have a lot of time. It was very blocky and looked like planks stapled together with spare wood. Which was exactly what we wanted.

It wasn't pretty, but it would be easy to get very uniform wood planks from it with a bit of ax work. One of the planks would be shorter and thinner than the others, but they could be set aside for supporting beams or other roles.

"Next problem," Levy said. "We can make wood out of this, but we don't have nails. There are ways to cut them so they can lock together, but we don't have the tools precise enough to make those kinds of cuts, and I don't know how to do them."

"Well, you might get sick of hearing this… but we can use your magic for this too," I said. "If you think about it, a nail is just a pointy 'T' with a small top part, right? And you can find 'T' in the word 'metal'. All caps would probably be best."

"But what about the other letters?" Levy pointed out.

I thought about it. "I'm not sure. Save them for now, see if we can't melt them down and forge something else maybe?"

She sighs. "I guess. I'll be using my magic a lot it seems."

"Sorry and thank you in advance," I said as I put a hand on her shoulder in what I hoped was a comforting manner. "Come on, let's start making some measurements and figure out roughly how much stuff we need."

We didn't exactly have a ruler or tape measure, but we used one of the clay slats we made to go over the kiln to serve as something consistent to reference, even if it wasn't an actual proper measurement.

We focused on the temporary outhouse first since we'd have to wait for the house anyway. We didn't make it very large. It was basically the size of a porta-potty and was little more than a toilet seat enclosed in a box tall enough to stand in.

VV dug the hole using Dig, saving me quite a bit of back breaking labor. I had seen the Gym Leader's Teddiursa tear through concrete with the power of the move, so it wasn't too surprising to see VV dig a little chamber under the ground in just seconds.

Once the chamber was dug I used the Catalog app to buy the Janitor Slime. Janitor Slime isn't its official name, but after how well he's worked out for us, I'm very open to the idea of using slimes for more things, so he needs a unique name to differentiate him from any other slimes we might get.

He appeared where the portal opens up in a small flash of light. He was very small, easily fitting in the palm of my hand. He didn't seem to have much in the way of sentience though, displaying no emotion as the others crowded around and looked at him. Something about him was very cute though.

But he had a duty to fulfill, so after making sure everyone knew what he looked like and that he should be left alone, I dropped him down in the hole.

As Levy and I started planning on how to actually make the rest of it out of wood, we quickly realized that only using uniform planks of wood was not going to work. We'd need a bunch of different sizes. Some of that could be done by chopping the larger ones to scale, but when all we had was an ax, it was going to be sloppy.

Still, we made it work. We picked a large open area for Levy to make 'WOOD', laid it flat on the ground, and then took an ax to it. One word netted us seven planks, an additional plank of a smaller size, and some scrap.

Since we didn't care about this staying up for too long, we decided to go with something simple. We took six planks and arranged them side by side, so that their long edges were flush with each other. Then we took the seventh plank, cut it in half, and placed each half horizontally across the other planks at about the ⅓ and ⅔ marks. Then it was just a matter of nailing the horizontal parts into each of the six planks, and we'd have a basic wall.

We didn't have a hammer, so after Levy made some 'METAL' with the 'T's sharpened to a point, I used the back of the ax to drive them in. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be. With the long handle of the ax and the angle I was working with, just hitting the nail was difficult. The wider head might have been a help if it were for the fact that it was all too easy to hit one of the wings of the 'T' and rather than push the nail in it just snapped off that part.

I took a break after the first one, sweat running down my body. I was glad Levy and I had decided to forgo wearing clothes at all, and not just because I enjoyed constantly checking out Levy's toned body. We had more clothes now, and some 'travel detergent' that could be mixed with a basin of water to hand wash clothes, but taking a bath was so much easier than hand washing the sweat out of them.

As I rested I felt a tap on my leg. I looked down to see Tinks looking up at me. "What's up?" I asked her, squatting down so I was closer to her.

She made one of her strange cries and pointed at the pile of scrap iron, which was just the extra letters from making nails and the handful of 'T's I broke. Then she pointed at herself and lifted her hammer up.

"You… want to use the metal for your hammer?" I asked. Tinks smiled and nodded. I shrugged and then looked over at Levy. "You don't mind, right?"

"Of course not!" Levy said. "Tinks you can use as much of the metal in that pile as you want, just make sure not to use the sharp ones we're using as nails, okay?"

Tinks let out a chime-like noise and rushed over to the pile of scrap, digging through it to find pieces she liked. I watched as she tested their quality by casually bending them with just her fingers. She then peeled off a part of her iron club, leaving a gaping hole in it. But she took two pieces, an 'M' and an 'L', bent them into shape, and fit them perfectly into place.

The resulting hammer didn't look that much different to me, but Tinks seemed satisfied with it, as she let out another happy noise and continued digging through the pile.

As she did, ideas circulated in my head. I grabbed my phone, which was over by the crate because the downside of not wearing clothes was not having pockets, and opened the Pokedex entries for Tinkatink.

"The Metalsmith Pokemon," I read out loud. "Oh my god, I completely missed that. Tinks, you wanna help us out?" Tinks looked over at me with a tilt of her head, but nodded.

I quickly laid out the next set of planks and then held the improvised nail in place. "I need you to hammer this into the wood, without hitting my fingers. Think you can do that?"

Tinks nodded casually and walked onto the planks of wood so she could reach it. She then raised her hammer up a bit and brought it back down.

I admit, I closed my eyes and flinched, fully expecting my fingers to get crushed. Instead there's a clean sound of metal hitting metal and the nail is pushed halfway into the board. I looked down at it and saw that it was perfectly straight, and it was by far better than anything I had managed.

I looked back up with a grin. "That was perfect Tinks," I said, patting her on the head. "Wanna keep going?"

Tinks nodded excitedly and raised her hammer with a cry.

With Tinks' help, we managed to finish the three walls much faster. I tried giving her the ax at some point, to see if her strength would let her chop the wood better, but she didn't seem comfortable holding it, and not just because it was far too large for her. If I had to guess, she has some instinctual affinity for hammers, and she's just not meant to wield something like an ax.

Three walls is not an outhouse though. We nailed them together into a 'U' shape and put them up around the hole, but it wasn't secure and felt like a strong gust of wind would knock it over. So we dug a small trench, laid some of the old scrap 'BRICK' parts from the previous design down around both sides, and then tightly packed the dirt around it. Tinks spent a bit hammering it down to get the dirt as condensed and sturdy as possible.

After that the outhouse was much more sturdy. It could probably still be ripped out of the ground, but it would take some pretty fierce winds. That is to say, it was good enough for now.

Though we weren't finished yet. We still needed a door and a roof, or else the rain would still be an issue. We also needed some kind of toilet so it wasn't still just a hole on the ground. Neither of those were particularly difficult though.

Smaller planks nailed together by Tinks formed a flat and square roof which was nailed into place on top. I had to lift Tinks and place her on top of the outhouse for that while Levy and I held it in place. One of the planks split when the nail was driven through it, but it didn't look too bad so we decided not to worry about it. It being temporary took a lot of stress off of making it correctly.

For a 'door' we basically just built another wall with a handle on the inside. Hinges or anything like that were a bit beyond our current capabilities to make, so the idea was you just move it to the side to enter and then put it back in place to give yourself some privacy. It was a little wider than the other walls to make that easier, and it was a lot shorter to account for the fact that the other walls were buried, but also so there was a gap between it and the roof that let in some light.

That did mean that some rain would get through on rainy days, but we decided that was better than it being super dark all of the time. It made us add glass production to our list of things we'd like to learn to make though.

We were stumped for the actual toilet for a bit though. But finally I had the idea of her making the word "WOOD" extra thick. We stacked the two 'O's on top of each other over the hole that led to the slime, creating a small toilet you could sit on.

All in all, it wasn't perfect, but it was a massive improvement to the setup they had before. Levy and I did rock-paper-scissors to determine who got to 'christen' it. Yes, it was silly, but after working so hard on it, and with breakfast having had enough time to digest a bit, it was a big deal at the time.

After that we had a late lunch. VV and Tinks split a blapple, the fruit too large for them to eat individually apparently. It made sense, if the fruit were scaled for human adults. Honestly, in that case them both being able to eat a full half was impressive.

We planted the berry bushes after that, putting them next to the pond. When we made a proper farm they'd be moved there. According to the book I bought, berry bush roots weren't terribly large, so moving them once they were fully grown wasn't too difficult or dangerous of a task.

After that we relaxed for the rest of the day, reading. Levy was reading one of the fiction books she purchased, VV curled up by her side. Tinks was passed out in my lap as I sat with my back against the blapple tree and read more about Pokemon berries.

Tinks had tired herself out hammering in those nails. She had fun with it, but she was so small and young compared to VV. I had looked up her evolutionary line in the Pokedex. She wouldn't get much bigger, but she would mature. Her evolutions actually mirrored a typical human development process, with her current form being very toddler-like. When she evolved she'd be more akin to a teenager, and finally an adult. A two foot tall adult, but still.

I had a lot of ideas for things Tinks could do. Our blacksmithing could potentially be done by her. It wasn't the image I had in mind when trying to figure out a blacksmith, but I didn't see a reason why she wouldn't work, eventually. Her strength and affinity for metal would let her pick up the skills easily, and her Fairy typing might lead to something even more interesting.

Still, right now she can't push herself too far, and I can't ask too much of her. She had slept most of yesterday, tired from our training session followed by the Gym challenge. Later this week I'll get her started on something simple, see how she takes to it, and go from there.

Tomorrow we get the Credits for the captures in Pokemon, so we'll probably spend all day figuring out how to spend those. It's gonna be a big day.

AN: For those reading on a site where I can upload images, it's probably pretty obvious that I made one of those words with actual fonts and the other in MS Paint.