The tutorial quest in the upper portion of her vision was updated, instructing her (very helpfully) to craft an axe. She pursed her lips and glared at the quest until the window expanded once more.
Welcome to the False Lands: Craft an axe. Gather the materials required to construct an axe. This will require the use of the blueprint system. Access blueprints from the crafting menu, and using them, craft one cut stone and one rope, and then combine them with one stick to craft an axe. The crafting menu can be accessed directly, but is most easily found from the inventory screen.
Tanisha turned her attention to the bottom right of her vision again and opened her inventory. She wasn’t sure what she expected, but, just as the quest text had implied, there was a visible pair of buttons on the left of her vision, almost like menu tabs. One was greyed out, but the other was a square with dotted lines on it. That had to be the blueprint menu. She reached out and touched it.
It wasn’t anything unique, really. There were two columns, one of which listed what were categories she found familiar to dARkness: Online, while the second displayed the items within that category. For the most part, she knew what to expect from them. “Refining” is where she would find the cut stone and rope in game, and so she instinctively navigated there.
Cut stone was the easier of the two, requiring only two rocks. Rope was only slightly harder, though, since it only required three bundles of grass. Both materials could be collected easily by hand, as long as the resources were around.
Tanisha dismissed the menus and starting hunting around the tutorial area for rocks. It was also an opportunity to get accustomed to the movements of her new chair. Which wasn’t really as bad as she was expecting. The way the legs moved were spidery, which made her stomach flutter. But it was more her dislike of spiders and less motion sickness. Moving the chair around was generally easy, and it made her task easier still.
The only snag she really ran into was when she was trying to collect the grass. The normal grass where she had spawned in wasn’t sufficient for the tutorial’s needs. Even in the game, grass that grew out of the ground normally wasn’t long enough or robust enough to be made into rope. There were specific patches of hardier stuff, and it stood longer than the grass on the forest floor.
Tanisha had struggled with a moment when she tried to reach down to collect the grass when she found it. That was, of course, before she remembered that her chair had started way down near the ground, and she might be able to command it to do so again. It took her a few tries to find the appropriate mental command—what seemed to work was thinking of the way the Seattle’s transit buses would “kneel” down to line up with the curb. But once she was lowered to an appropriate position, Tanisha found herself able to rip the grass out of the ground in the necessary handfuls.
As well as a few extra. Just in case. She wasn’t sure if the gamefied world had a crafting failure system, and she would rather have replacements and not need them.
Finding rocks was relatively easy, once she stopped looking for the giant boulders she knew from the game and instead started looking for fist-sized rocks laying on the ground. They were conveniently placed around the area, as if just for the purposes of the tutorial itself. Tanisha collected about half a dozen total, only mildly frustrated by the constant up-and-down motion. It was easier than walking on her hands, so it would have to do.
Once the rocks were collected, Tanisha decided to scope out the rest of the grotto a bit more. Along the way she picked up a handful of sticks—since it would be the final thing she needed for the axe—and also a bit more grass. It felt awkward to hold everything in her lap, but the chair’s movements were so smooth and even that nothing got jostled too much.
The rest of the grotto was much like the bit she’d already seen. There were trees, a creek, and a stone wall. After a few dozen feet in any direction, she’d hit a barrier—either metaphorically or physically, in the case of the stone. She didn’t like being corralled into this tiny area, and Tanisha finally decided that she’d likely have to complete the whole tutorial before the invisible wall went away.
Once back to the relative center of her temporary prison, Tanisha decided to get back to completing her forced quest. She decided to start with the cut stone, and so navigated to her inventory, and then again to the blueprint menu. Tanisha wasn’t sure what to expect, but, in theory, that’s why the tutorial was here. When she found the blueprint she wanted and poked it, the crafting menu closed and instead Tanisha found herself looking at a ghostly image of a spectral rock, floating cartoonishly in the air.
Blueprint. More like a booklet included with a bit of build-your-own furniture. Something where half of the instructions were in broken English, while the images only told you half of the story at the best of times.
She picked up a rock out of her lap and lifted it until it overlapped the spectral stone before her. As soon as they bisected, the blueprint updated, moving onto the next step. Now it showed a second spectral stone hammering against the first one. Such a thing seemed a little arbitrary, but there was no way for her to learn without doing. Tanisha grabbed another rock and started smashing it against the first one in the exact way the spectral instructions showed.
It took an entire minute of smashing the rocks together before her cut stone was formed, but along the way she could see the difference in the first rock. It changed shape. The way it was reshaping didn’t make a lot of sense, at least compared to how she was striking it with the second rock. She wasn’t chipping away at the stone so much as she was hammering it into shape. But the shape still came through, and when the spectral second rock finally stopped smashing against the spectral first rock, she held a finished cut stone. Or so she assumed. It was roughly the shape of a brick, and it had a satisfying weight to it.
The other rock cracked apart in her hand immediately, turning to gravel.
“Interesting,” Tanisha said. She’d never really thought of how this all worked in game. If something said she needed two of something, they were removed from her inventory and a timer started. When the timer was done, she had the finished product. The general theory was the same here, but the required manual components were interesting. Made sense, in a way, too.
After she finished sweeping useless gravel off her lap, Tanisha went back to the blueprint menu and found the rope. Like before, a spectral version of what she needed to do appeared, and Tanisha matched it. First she held up a fistfull of the grass—roots and all—in the air. Next she was instructed to lay a second handful across the first, wrapping around and tucking into place, and then finally a third bundle tucked into the first. It took a long moment for Tanisha to realize she was being instructed to braid the rope. It seemed so obvious now, but the actual instructions just seemed inadequate. Especially since there was nothing holding the tops into place. She hadn’t been instructed to make a knot.
But logic had no place in the False Lands, apparently. And so Tanisha did what she was told. She worried about how messy the bundles of grass had been when she picked them up, but those fears soon dissipated when she realized it didn’t matter. The finished rope formed in her hands—neat and tidy and almost pristine, as if in defiance of her sloppy technique.
“That’s a bit surreal,” Tanisha said as she examined the rope. The finished product was nearly three feet in length, even though she hadn’t spent nearly that amount of work or organization into making it. “But, honestly, I’m not going to complain. Just… pout.”
The physical act of crafting things was familiar, and somehow cathartic. She’d never really had an attachment to any sort of in-game crafting mechanics. It was just pushing a few buttons and then watching cooldowns. And since, at least in dARkness, the materials just vanished and the final product appeared, there was no real satisfaction to be found. But here, in this place? Creating with her hands? It felt good. Right. She enjoyed working with her hands and making things.
Perhaps, after she got out of here, she’d need to take up a new h
obby. Woodworking. Maybe even crocheting. It was something she’d always wanted to do.
But she put away such thoughts—easy to do when the only way out was to focus—and went about finding the next blueprint. For the axe, it was under toolmaking, which seemed painfully obvious now, but Tanisha remembered her confusion when she first started playing dARkness. She had only ever played high fantasy games before, and an axe was a weapon in those, not a tool.
Following the blueprint was as simple as the previous ones. She took her stick, and then hammered her cut stone into the top of it, creating a fork in the wood. There was a moment of panic when she thought she’d broken the thing and would need to start again, but the stone was stuck fast, and so Tanisha moved onto the rope portion of the craft. She watched the spectral rope wrap around the stone and stick, and she mimicked it, even if it felt woefully inadequate.
Within a minute, Tanisha was tying off the rope and looking for the next step. None came. Instead, the thing she held in her hand wasn’t some awkwardly placed brick stone with a rope criss-crossed around it to hold it to a stick. It was a finished axe. The stone was angled into an axe head, and the edge was sharpened. The stick seemed thicker and straighter than it had been, as well, and the rope binding it seemed to be secured.
“Huh,” Tanisha said, turning the tool over in her hands. The edge wasn’t razor sharp, but it would be useful for simple work in setting up camp, and the whole thing had a satisfying weight to it. “I really shouldn’t complain, though. Have you seen those videos about primitive tool making? The alternative to this just coming together with videogame magic is me taking the better part of a day to craft something half as good. And then just likely have it break the first time I tried to use it.”
Before she could continue talking to either the axe or her chair (she wasn’t really sure which), the quest in the upper corner of her UI flashed in completion, and updated with her next objective.
Welcome to the False Lands: Build a campfire. Fire is an important resource in the False Lands, providing light at night to help preserve your Stability, heat you during cold seasons to keep you from taking damage from frostbite, and it is a quick way to cook food that can’t otherwise be consumed raw, like meat and fish, but also certain types of mushrooms. The Blueprint system will outline how a campfire can be built, using a combination of logs and grass. Once built, flammable materials can be dropped into the fire to increase its intensity and duration.
“Did… did you just tell me how fire works?” Tanisha sat in incredulous silence for a moment before opening her mouth to continue complaining, but she stopped herself. She thought of people like that kid she saved from the woods. Would people like him know how a fire works? One person’s experience was not universal. Maybe not everyone grew up with frequent camping trips, or had never spent an autumn night in the woods with a bonfire. “Alright, fine,” she said, completely embracing the grumpy tone that carried her words. “Carry on, I suppose.”
She navigated to the menu, finding the basic campfire under survival, just as expected. It needed two handfuls of grass—which she already had—but it also required three logs. The paltry sticks in her lap wouldn’t cut it. The tutorial didn’t tell her how to get logs, of course, but Tanisha had a pretty good idea. And logically, it would be why the tutorial started her off with an axe.
Tanisha mauvered her chair over to the nearest tree. She reached out and touched the light colored bark. While she wasn’t sure what type of tree this was—it had flat, triangular leaves that were dark green on top and bronze on the other side—it didn’t seem to be incredibly thick.
“Your noble sacrifice is appreciated,” Tanisha murmured to the tree. She guided her chair to an appropriate position, one that would give her angle and leverage to put her axe to work. But then she hesitated. She’d never felled a tree on her own, and didn’t know if it would take her ages to do so.
After the first swing, Tanisha scolded herself for worrying. The simplified crafting was forgiving, and so was the physical labor bits. Her axe sunk into the trunk nearly six inches, sending fragments of bark scattering from the blow. With a laugh, Tanisha ripped the axe from the slit and took another swing. Ultimately, it took her less time to chop her way through the entire tree than it took her to build the axe in the first place.
“Logic has no place in the False Lands.”
The tree made a few cracking noises in response and began to tip over. Tanisha quickly dropped her hands to the sides of her chair, just in case she needed to dart away. The tree fell smoothly, however, with a thunderous crash and a resounding chorus of cracking noises. Before her very eyes, the tree segmented into conveniently manageable chunks. Each log was almost as long as her torso, and there was nearly a half dozen of them.
And they were heavy, too. There was no magical weight adjustment for the logs, so Tanisha struggled with the thing, both getting it into her chair, and then again into her inventory. But once she’d done one, the others were easy. And they stacked, which was nice. By the time she’d gotten three in her inventory, a message flashed up across her vision:
Logging has reached Level 1.
Tanisha stared at the notification for a moment. “Ugh, are you kidding me? I’m not saying that I’d be okay with being kidnapped, but did you have to delevel me, too?” She was just really starting to accept this world as a game. But the notification wasn’t telling her that her character got better at doing something. It was literally telling Tanisha that she was learning to harvest resources.
“You know what? I can’t think about this right now. I need to get out of this tutorial so I can get to Otekah’s castle. Wherever that is.” She stared at the notification again before dismissing it. “I can only deal with one mind-bending headache at once.”
The rest of the logs went into her inventory. For a moment she thought about chopping down another tree, but she wasn’t planning on setting up a summer home here in the False Lands. If she needed another tree, she could always easily find one.
Tanisha moved away from the trees and looked for a patch of bare ground where she would feel comfortable building a campfire. There weren’t a lot of places that seemed safe, but she didn’t have a lot of options within her little tutorial bubble. And it was unlikely that this game-like world would punish her for such a thing. She stilled climbed down out of her chair, however, and used some of the sticks she’d collected to scrape clear an area.
“Well, here goes nothing, hopefully.” Tanisha pulled up the campfire blueprint. “Or the entire forest. One of the two.”
Assembling the fire from the blueprint was easy, if not very strange. It involved putting two logs down parallel to each other, packing the space between them with grass, and then putting the third log down on top. It looked less like a campfire made for the woods, and more like the way you’d assemble firewood in a wood stove. The grass between the logs began to smoke and smolder almost immediately. Its smoke was lighter than a normal campfire, especially for one made with wood that hadn’t been dried. But no sparks or embers seemed to be jumping out of it.
Tanisha guessed it was safe. She didn’t regret clearing away the grassy undergrowth, and she would likely do it again the next time. But it wasn’t necessary.
With a grimace, Tanisha wiped sweat from her brow. She’d done a lot of work so far, and she was seriously hoping the campfire would be the end of the tutorial. But the UI quest text updated to something else, and Tanisha sighed.
Welcome to the False Lands: Construct a woodworking workbench. Workbenches allow you to perform advanced crafting to manipulate materials in ways that are impossible with your bare hands. With a woodworking workbench, you will be able to process wooden logs into boards, and combine them with other materials to create useful objects and furniture.
“Of course. Onwards and upwards,” she said with only a touch of the bitterness she actually felt.
Chapter 11
The woodworking workbench required two rocks and two logs, and Tan
isha was thankful she had these on hand already. But it also needed eight sticks, and she didn’t have near that many anymore. But, if the trees here were anything like in dARkness: Online, Tanisha knew she’d be able to harvest branches from the top of it.
She directed her chair towards the neatly cut off tree top and sized it up for a moment. The tangled mass of branches was imposing, and she found it easier to get down in the dirt next to it to hack them into sticks. Each one came away from the tree in roughly the same length as her axe, as long as she got within the general size. Longer seemed to be fine, but shorter would cause the branch to erupt into little more than kindling.
Once she had a thick handful of sticks, Tanisha set about figuring out where she wanted to construct her workbench. She ultimately decided to set it up near her campfire. It likely wasn’t going to be important, but the quest text had warned her that darkness was dangerous, and she wouldn’t put it past Otekah to cycle her into night to demonstrate. At the very least, her experiences in the mobile game had taught her good habits.
Back at the campfire, Tanisha pulled up the blueprint screen and navigated to the construction menu. She found the woodworking workbench on the menu, and, just like before, she followed the spectral guide to turn her logs, rocks, and sticks into a functional workbench and crude tools.
About halfway through the process, however, Tanisha realized her rocks weren’t right. The ones in the craft were the angular brick of the cut stone she had used to make her axe. The two plain rocks she was holding would be useless. She had four rocks, and thus could make the two cut stone, but she wasn’t sure if the blueprint system would work if she was already in the middle of a craft. In the mobile game, the crafting system wouldn’t allow you to start until you had all the materials. Would she have to start over on the workbench? If she did, would she get all the materials back she’d put into it, or were those gone now?
Darkness Named Page 8
