Substitutions didn't work. The deer meat didn't work in the antelope recipe. At least it didn't botch and cost us materials...it just failed to trigger.

Nor did the wheat we found work as we'd hoped. We found rye, and rye is apparently rye, but what we'd've found in the same place as rye in Eorzea is sunset wheat, whereas what we found northwest of Wyatt is apparently "prairie wheat", which doesn't work in the sunset flour recipe. Even grinding it by hand (which is annoying if you don't have the tools for it) didn't produce a flour that would work in our crafting log. We could make conventional pancakes with it, but not fill an Eorzean crafting recipe.

So we made our own.

Our journals are magic books with an indefinite number of pages. As we gain more knowledge by exploring or harvesting or learning or whatever, the number of pages goes up even though the book doesn't occupy more space. But there's always a few blank pages at the ends of certain sections. So we tried to see if we could just write new recipes in.

Ballpoints didn't work. Gel pen ink wouldn't stick. Sharpies smeared, which I'd never seen before, but a little soap and water cleaned the pages again. We tried quills and bottled ink (which was really hard to find in this town), but the ink just sort of sat on the paper like drops of black mercury.

Fortunately we'd found copper sand near the wheat, and a couple deer I'd killed dropped beastkin blood, so we mixed up some enchanted copper ink. That worked, at least for these low-level recipes...we'll have to see if we need stronger ink for higher-level ones. With that we could write up a recipe for prairie flour, made from prairie wheat. And that at least got a reaction, though it got a lot of botches until we got the proportions right. Eorzean recipes call for particular units of things, like "one" wheat, which does not mean one grain. Working out what one unit of wheat was took experimenting.

We didn't find moko grass like in Eorzea either...we found "okie" grass. (What will we find in Montana? Monty grass?) But we did find that we could make a second hempen yarn recipe that used okie grass. So we're on the verge of being able to make extra clothes, even if they're a little hippiesque.

In Eorzea I never really thought about how I could see the names of things, and now it's weird that I can do that here, at least for Eorzea-skill-gathered stuff. My prairie flour from my prairie wheat "looks" like prairie flour, while store-bought flour just looks like flour. I may need to see if I can combine them, pad my prairie flour with Earth flour, to see how much I can mix in before it's not prairie flour any more. Hope Tsu'na likes my pancakes.

Tsu'na's been quiet today, but cooperative. I think she's taken what I said to heart. I hope she can think of herself as a pioneer, a vanguard leading the way to Earth-based Eorzean discovery. Like, for instance, honestly I didn't know Return would work. We haven't found any aetherites ("yet"), so the place we appeared on Earth is apparently our default "home" point. That at least means we only have to fly to our destination and can Return home afterwards. Great discovery, my love. And thank you for scaring the hell out of me watching you disappear not knowing where (or if) you'd show up.

I hope she knows I love her and value her and treasure her and don't mean to objectify her, but this stuff is important. We'll probably be (re-)learning stuff here for a long time. If we're copies that were created here we probably won't be leaving, even if we find yet another Circle, so our life is here. We need to know what our capabilities are. I need to know. And I may need her to show me.

Now, where the hell am I going to find buffalo milk?