Mateo

It was actually fascinating to see how he seemingly stared at the wooden joints for long periods of time for seemingly no reason, just to randomly start trying to recreate it on his own model based on what he could see. And to my surprise, despite never having carved wood before, to my knowledge at least, he was able to recreate the Sampo-Gumi-Shikuchi wooden joinery technique almost flawlessly.

As for the other two joinery techniques, he had a slightly harder time trying to recreate those as he could not see how the joints connected when they were fully done, but after a couple of attempts, he seemed to make a somewhat functional version of them. Plus, he showed to be very cautious when using an ax which alleviated my fear that he might hurt himself.

I thought he would stop there as he had already finished all of the wooden joints he could copy, so I left him with Leo knowing that he was probably safe going to help everyone else with the assembling of houses using the first batch of finished pillars.

While I worked, I had begun to think aback Leo's friend, more specifically his leg, as although it seemed to be completely fine from an outside perspective, he was still having a somewhat hard time moving around on his own and needed the help of Leo to walk at a normal pace.

Although I hoped that it was just a temporary injury that would eventually go away, there was not even a sign of swelling, so it was pretty unlikely; regardless, since he only seemed to have a minor inconvenience regarding moving, I decided to make some crutches for him before the end of the day.

The rest of the day leading up to lunch went a lot better than expected, and we were able to set up the basic build of the first new house to the south of the river. I was excited because if we kept this pace, we would make room for all new stellers in just 5 days.

As I walked towards the campfire, I noticed that both Leo and his friend were working on something. As for how Leo got his hands on an extra ax so that he could help out, I had no idea, but since not everyone on the house, building duty needed one, it wasn't that much of a problem.

I ended up walking up to where they were and see what they were working on, only to be shocked when I saw that they had begun working on a wood joinery 'technique' of their own. They seemed to have based their joint off of the Hako-Aikaki-Shachi-Sen-Shikuchi. Still, instead of just trying to make another design to connect two pieces into a corner, they had to create something similar to a Yatoizane-tome-shikuchi wooden joint.

By this, I meant that instead of connecting two separate pieces of wood to create a corner, they instead opted to carve two slots on top of both pieces of wood so that when they have put together, they could insert two small pieces of carved wood on the top to keep them together. And while they hadn't yet gotten to the point where they made the base wider than the top, the idea was indeed impressive, especially considering that they had no prior knowledge of this.

Before I could congratulate them or show approval, Leo had noticed that I was 'spying' on what they were doing and pushed me away, which was understandable since I had suddenly shown up with no warning, on the bright side though, at the very least he had decided not to hit me this time.

As I ate lunch, I began to wonder whether what Leo and his friend had done was really special or not. Of course, I understood that they had done something incredible, but I didn't yet know if it was simply because they were talented or because they were children. After all, I hadn't seen what any of the other kids were doing, and I know for a fact that Leo would have probably never even shown interest in wood joinery unless his friend wasn't there.

That was for later though, as we still had to get everyone to get used to life ib the settlement before I could run experiments. So with that plan in mind, I just passed the rest of the day helping everyone else set up the houses while setting apart a small amount of time to making crutches for Leo's friend.

So, the day ended with nothing much else happening apart from Leo and his friend experimenting with using slightly wider bases for their connecting piece, Leo's friend seemed happy when he realized that he could use the crutch to walk independently, causing Leo to show a smile for the first time since he arrived at the settlement.

Sadly though, although we could get two houses set up, there were still eight kids without any to sleep in, so they all got into the same position as last time. When I saw this, I turned around and signaled Leo's friend to follow me, which he did slowly as he was still getting used to his crutches. Once he got to where I was with Leo right behind him, I just signaled to the bed before leaving.

I knew that they had already seen me use it before as I had slept in the same place yesterday before they went to sleep, so it was a given that they would know how to use it. As for why I gave that kid the bed, it was because although I couldn't know why he was limping, his leg probably hurt, so allowing him not to have to put it on the floor for hours on end was probably the best way to go about improving his condition.

Before I went to sleep, I also decided to give Leo's friend a name, as it felt weird just to call him Leo's friend; he was his own person after all. So after a very short amount of time, I just decided to call him Mateo; as for a season, there was none; it was just one of the first names that came to my head. Once I did that though, I finally clocked out for the day.