Gathering Strength

by Aaron Jay

  I breathed. Prana flowed through me and I retained what I could. My mana bar filled breath by breath. I did my best to ignore the scrabbling sounds that seemed like they were coming closer. That was just in my head, right? Stop thinking, breathe. I leaped up and unleashed more acid. Its hp dropped down as acid splashed across it. Its hp had fallen back down into the teens by the time I ran out of mana once again.

  Other than worry, I couldn’t do much as I dropped down into meditation. But I could do math. If I got to fill up my mana once more I could knock off twelve more hp before it escaped the trap. It would gain back five hp while I meditated. Arithmetic is simple. Breathe in, It has 16 hp Breathe out, 6 more for regeneration. Breathe in, take away 12 more in acid damage. Breathe out, it will have ten hp when it kills me. Math is the ultimate honey-badger.

  I ran through the rest of the possibilities in my spell book. All the spells that might immobilize the thing wouldn’t last long enough to help me regain my mana, even assuming the thing wasn’t immune to them in the first place. No, acid would have worked if I had known about it from the beginning. All that mana wasted on spells that it was immune to. Knowledge really is power. I had one spell I hadn’t tried yet that might make the math work out.

  The rock tipped over and the Tarrasquito scrabbled up the side of the pit, digging the side of the pit into a ramp it could use its six legs to maneuver up. I chanted “shakti bijalee” over and over in time with my breathing and electric sparks flowed down my forearms and across my hands. There was no point in being timid. Either electricity would work on the creature or it wouldn’t. Live or die, I threw myself at the creature, grasping its head between my hands as if I was going to kiss the thing. Electricity arced between my hands and through it. For a panicked moment I thought it was immune because it didn’t react at all, but then I realized that it wasn’t reacting because its muscles had locked up. Its hp dropped as electricity coursed through it.

  Turns out I am a pretty mean-spirited bastard. I really enjoyed being that close as I killed it off. I killed it! Eat that you nigh invulnerable little bastard. Once it was devoid of life it no longer seemed so frightening. It was just a squat turtle-like beasty. It was worth a big enough chunk of exp to get me a decent way towards my next level. But what I was even more interested in was whether any part of this creature would help my gathering quest enough to justify how much time it had taken me to kill it. I also had to get back to the licorice plant before anything else got to it.

  Cutting this thing down into parts was almost as much of a pain in the ass as killing it off had been. There was a small crease hidden behind a lip where its dorsal shell met its ventral plating. I had to use a rock to jam my skinning knife between the two. I was more tired just cutting along that seam and around the leg joints and tail than I had been digging the pit I had trapped it inside. My hands ached from grasping the blade so hard and I knew that if my strength or dex was any lower I might not even be able to skin this thing. Which is when I realized I was an idiot.

  My meditation was a lot easier to accomplish without this thing coming for my throat. I buffed myself up and with my now magically enhanced strength, cutting the creature was going a lot smoother. I knew it would take less time in the end and I’d likely get a better-quality skin than one where I was forced to hack and shred the edges.

  You have received:

  Tarrasquito carapace: one of the premier materials for making leather shields or armor. The durability and resistance of this material makes leatherworkers drool.

  Tarrasquito Meat x 5: The harder the shell the sweeter the meat. A true delicacy. Prepared properly, the Tarrasquito’s flesh can flush toxins and poisons from your system.

  I wanted to rest as I was now covered in tarrasquito fluids and little chunks of flesh. I knew that with enough time the system would automatically remove those, but a shower was really tempting. Unfortunately for any plans to have a shower, that licorice plant was now without its guardian. I knew if I didn’t get back in good time it would either be eaten or adopted by some other monster. No rest for the wicked. With a grunt I started a steady jog back now for the fifth time to the licorice plant.

  That Tarrasquito gave up some really good loot. Premiere materials made great equipment. This is another example of how the Party stacked the deck. If I didn’t have the Party starter equipment, even if I was able to beat this monster (unlikely), I’d constantly be left with the choice of turning in the materials or getting them crafted into equipment I’d desperately need. My armor and shield were decent enough until level ten if I pushed it. Without this advantage, well, if you used or sold loot rather than donating toward the gathering quest, you would never complete the quest.

  The Party claimed that if you struck a balance between donating and using loot it was possible to work through the quest at a reasonable pace. Theoretically this was true but Amulius, their pet AI who ruled over the game, shifted the relative values on a constant and irregular basis. There was no way to know which commodities were worth what. They also adjusted the combat capacity of mobs a bit, as well as how much experience you gained by killing them. They claimed this was necessary to prepare players for how unknowable and unpredictable the fighting was beyond the Crib. True enough. But it made this particular quest really PTW. My father told me that PTW used to mean pay-to-win. Apparently, we have always had games where you needed money to succeed. Nowadays we knew it stood for Party-to-win.

  With a small sigh of regret at the higher end armor and food I wouldn’t get to eat or use, I donated the Tarrasquito’s remains as I ran. I thought I might have actually seen the completion bar fill in a bit. Or maybe it was a mirage from my jogging and wish fulfillment. In either event it would be a tiny sliver. I looked at the actual stats and once again grappled with that bastard math. The materials were worth a whopping .412% of the total I needed. It took me almost two days to kill the Tarrasquito and harvest it. Woo hoo! If I could find, kill and harvest a Tarrasquito every two days I’d finish off the quest in about two hundred and forty days. I’d finish this quest before my year was up. I’d have no time to work on any of the other quests but that wasn’t the point.

  Let me tell you a bit more about math and how you can use it to make something seem better than it is without technically lying. As I’ve said, you can’t lie with math. But you can give a serious pep talk or hit job if you know your way around some numbers. Sure, .412% completion from the Tarrasquito wasn’t much. It wasn’t enough to let me win my bet. I should be bummed. But let math woo you with the siren song of the second derivative. What is the second derivative you ask? It is the rate at which some trend changes. Before the Tarrasquito, when I was just killing spiders and collecting seedlings, I was hitting about .09% of the quest per day. With the Tarrasquito I was making around .2% of the quest per day. The second derivative says that I was now completing my quest 222% faster. I’ve more than tripled my questing speed! Doesn’t that sound great?

  If I really wanted to pump myself up I could use the third derivative. Or, the rate of the change of the rate of change. I more than doubled my questing speed in about three days. According to the third derivative if I kept that up I could expect to always double my questing speed every three days. In six days it would more than quadruple. In nine days I’d be questing at eight times the speed I did when I first started. Exponential improvement until I wrapped up my quest in no time at all. Yeah. That is B.S. but mathematically correct.

  Politicians and others always used these math tricks to tell people that crime was either plummeting or getting out of control. If you had one murder last year and two this year you can say “Crime has doubled!” You could use a small change to say that heaven or hell was just a second or third derivative around the corner. I chose to believe that my questing speed was going to keep rising so I could win this bet. After all, math said so.

  I made it back to the young licorice plant. It was right where it had been, safe and sound. The plant was about three feet tall.
My herbalism training let me know it had pinnate leaves. I’ll assume that you aren’t a professional or even amateur botanist. Pinnate means that its leaves looked sort of like feathers with a central shaft and leafy stuff coming out symmetrically off the sides. It had blue-white flowers that grew in little bunches. If you want to become an amateur botanist, you should call these bunches inflorescences. It smelled, well, like licorice. Looking at its flowers I saw that some of them had turned to seed pods. If only I could engage in some agriculture. Planting seeds on land you didn’t control wasn’t cost effective. You had to sit by the plants just like that Tarrasquito did if you wanted to raise them. Unless you owned land, it was the life of a hunter-gatherer for you. God damned Party.

  I harvested the plant and donated it to the system.

  My herbalism got a nice bump from harvesting the higher tiered plant. I could have turned the licorice plant into a strong base for a number of potions. Or, it could be made into a few Cure Disease potions. Healing potions were generally more useful but monsters and traps that caused disease weren’t all that rare either. I’d have liked the option to craft things from my materials or even to be able to buy gear and consumable items. Half of my prep for playing the game back when I thought it would be Jude and me involved choosing a home base that had the right benefits and prices and access to convenient hunting grounds and dungeons.

  Without a home base, what was I going to do when my equipment broke or I needed a potion to cure some disease I contracted? Suppose something cast a curse upon me or my gear? I’d worry about that when I needed to. For the moment I just needed to push on. Homeless wanderer is a classic of the fantasy genre. My father said that the games of his youth like D&D were playing murder hobo. Wander around killing things and taking their wealth, even if that was their skins or internal organs. See what people turn into without a home?

  I decided to continue the plan of making my way up the valley towards the edge of the Crib and then back along the opposite side of the valley. It was steep enough that it was more of a canyon. As I proceeded, I kept my spell ring stocked and gave myself a buff between encounters to speed myself on my way. The time this saved on gathering, moving across the uneven terrain and getting the best of the low-level monsters I encountered made the extra time meditating and casting a decent investment. The extra dexterity also boosted my ability to harvest and glean the seedlings I came across. The more successful attempts at gathering helped keep my herbalism skill nudging upwards. My gathering rate went up a tiny tick from my first days grabbing the spiders and seedlings.

  There were other monsters that were pretty easy to deal with. Thus far no sign of anything humanoid. Just monstrous versions of natural animals. Spiders, rabbits, iguanas.

  The yip of a coyote called in the distance. Yip makes it sound like it was a high-pitched kind of bark. This thing sounded three times the size of a regular coyote as its yip was three times as deep in sound. I headed towards it for a bit but it ran off across the valley before I could get to it. I decided against chasing it despite it being another decent sized piece of donation and exp on the hoof. I wanted to finish a thorough survey of the valley.

  The wall spiders were getting predictable enough that I wasn’t unleashing my spell to take them out. I could set myself when they leaped down on me and maim them along one side of their legs. Once their mobility was shot, taking them out went pretty quickly. This meant I didn’t have to meditate as often. My gathering rate went up another tick. The rabbits were old hat at this point, so I took them down quickly. Unfortunately, they were also worth almost nothing when I donated them to the quest. Still, every bit of efficiency I could wring out of my routine was valuable.

  This valley was an amazing improvement from the Mines of Madness. The air was dry and crisp. The light was bright as there were few clouds in the sky, which was a delicate shade of blue. The rock formations I scrambled across were endlessly intriguing. A mix of organic curves, unlikely protuberances, and sharp-edged angles. The colors were more varied than they seemed at first. Yes, brown dominated. Brown sand and brown rock and brown dirt. But there were so many shades - from a pale tan that was almost yellow down to a deep reddish umber. And always if you looked carefully were little pops of other color. Some plant or flower. A bit of semi-precious stone embedded in some rocks. I collected a few of these greedily. The dwarven mining pick-axe I had found back in the mines made them a sweet little boost to my gathering rate.

  After two more days working my way up the valley towards the edge of the Crib I started to feel like I was getting the hang of this place. It was starting to feel like my valley. Which is, of course, when an emergency message wrenched me back into the real world.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “EMERGENCY LOGOUT WILL BE INITIATED IN ONE MINUTE. POD CONNECTION AND SECURITY IS THREATENED.”

  A klaxon and this emergency message startled me right in the middle of fighting an iguana. I was trying to learn more monsters’ combat habits so I wouldn’t have to spend the time using and reloading my spell ring. Luckily, I had just blocked a strike from its tongue--which it could lob at you from over a dozen feet away.

  “YOU WILL BE DISCONNECTED IN 45 SECONDS!”

  I knew that the pods were supposed to be able to dump you out of the game in case of emergency, but had never actually encountered such a thing. My iguana sparring partner wasn’t quick enough to take advantage of my loss of focus. The fight needed to end now. A gesture and three bolts of magic force decapitated the iguana. Sorry Gex. I didn’t have time to harvest him before I’d be logged out.

  Where was a safe spot to drop out where I was unlikely to be ambushed as soon as I logged back in? Damn it. I rushed over to a nearby boulder and put my back to it - at least I’d be facing whatever tried to jump me when I could log back in.

  The best defense is, of course, a good offence. My spell ring was my best punch and it was empty. I rushed into the pose, breathing, and chant needed to reload my spell ring.

  “10 SECONDS. TRY TO DISENGAGE FROM ANY COMBAT OR OTHER DANGEROUS ACTIVITY. PROCEED TO THE SAFEST POSITION YOU CAN TO LOG OUT! 9… 8… 7… DISENGAGE FROM ANY COMBAT OR OTHER DANGEROUS ACTIVITY. PROCEED TO THE SAFEST POSITION YOU CAN BEFORE YOU WILL BE LOGGED OUT! 4… 3… 2…”

  I’d give you odds of five to three that I finished loading my spell ring before I fell out of the game. Better than even odds. But considering it might be the difference between having my face bitten off when I logged back in or not it wasn’t something I really wanted to bet about in the first place.

  Gray smells…

  The taste of drums…

  The sound of vanilla…

  … and I was back in my pod. The klaxon was still going. What the hell was going on? I opened my pod and climbed out. The lights in the apartment were rapidly dimming and turning back on to full. Otherwise, all the items in my apartment looked undisturbed. The bed was unmade just as I had left it. The light switch had no effect on the blinking. I turned back to the only thing of actual value in the apartment: my pod. The telltales on the pod were all green except the one that signaled its connection status. That blinked a yellow that was rapidly deepening to red. WTF?

  I queried the building systems and found out that the lights and klaxon were something called a fire alarm. I was supposed to evacuate my apartment and the building as it was apparently on fire. An actual fire. Given our level of material science we hadn’t had anything like a standing fire department or fire drills for a long, long time.

  I moved toward the door, then turned around. Fortunately, I had a container for transporting nano. I emptied my system as fast as it could go. The building was hectoring me to leave and maybe I was foolishly committing suicide by stopping to grab my life savings, but without that I’d only have a life of virtual slavery to look forward to anyway. It wasn’t the physical process of getting my nano out of the pod that was taking so much time but jumping through all the security hoops while my pod was only sporadically connected to the rest
of the Game system. Yes, I really do mean to empty my pod and yes, I really am me.

  The pod’s connection went totally red just after I finally got the pod to authorize the nano removal. Whatever had managed to disconnect my pod couldn’t be good. I might have killed myself grabbing the nano. Maya would have mourned the loss of a good slave. I threw the container of nano into my backpack and ran for the door.

  The nano felt like it was pushing me out into the hallway. The inscrutable stuff never moved in predictable ways. It was just as I opened the door and burst into the smokey hallway that the thoughts of Maya and the emergency connected more forcefully in my mind. I had enemies. Some of them were even in this building.

  Sure, you are sitting there thinking how much smarter you are than me. You’d have already guessed that the fire was no random calamity. But you don’t have a klaxon ringing in your ears and the lights cycling up and down, do you? I had just been duking it out with a giant lizard moments ago. My confused brain just began to wonder where Aabid was when he tackled me from out of the smoke.

  He drove me down, landing on top. I sprawled, disoriented from the smoke, klaxon and the sudden attack.

  Aabid and I had tangled twice already and both times I had come out on top. I wasn’t worried. He’d zig and I would out-zag him. I then recalled that I only out-zagged him in the game. There had been another fight between us on the stairway of our apartment building in real life. He had zigged the zag right out of me that time. Well, he had a bunch of friends with him that time. Let’s see how one on one goes.