In response to her protest, the woods whispered to her again. Tanisha looked up, and for a long moment she just stared. From between the fingers of shadow in the trees, long and lean humanoids stood, staring at her with eyes that pulsed and glowed in the darkness.
“Alright, alright,” she said, trying to avoid staring at the oncoming creatures. “I’m looking.”
Chapter 16
Tanisha’s stability bar continued to tick down, like the clock on a bomb, as she searched for the mushrooms. She found the red one tucked up against the base of a tree near the middle of the tutorial space. The purple one was next to her metalworking workbench, up against the rock wall. Both spots were well within the shade, and so it took a considerable amount of mental fortitude to collect them. The figures in the trees just waited and watched as she collected them.
Afraid that she was going to mess things up, Tanisha read the quest text three times before she did anything with the mushrooms. She wanted to be totally sure she didn’t mix them up before she popped the purple one in her mouth.
It was gross. The fungus had a mealy consistency that felt like she was eating a styrofoam packing peanut made out of earthworms. She had to fight to not immediately retch and spit it back out on the ground. It took everything she had to swallow it.
The difference was immediate. While her body wanted to reject the mushroom, she could see the purple bar in the corner refilled almost all the way. Light and color returned to her vision, dispelling the lurking shadows. For one long moment, the figures made of darkness lurked on, but then they too broke apart, scattering like smoke in the wind.
Tanisha breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, that’s better.” She leaned over the side of her chair and spit, hoping to get the earthy taste out of her mouth. “I’ll reserve judgement on whether it was worth it, though.”
In spite of her blustering, Tanisha felt relieved. Stick Folk, the creatures who had lurked in the darkness, were no joking matter. They were born of some developer at DeKR’s love for the tribal tales told to children who refused to sleep. The dangerous forest spirits were an overwhelming force in the game, and Tanisha didn’t want to deal with them in the flesh.
With a sigh, she looked to the red mushroom sitting firmly in her lap. “Well, I guess we might as well get this over with,” she said to the bright-red cap. She returned to her campfire, which was still burning. It was looking a little low, but it wasn’t like she was planning on staying here long. Refueling it would just mean she’d need to collect more resources at some point.
Tanisha took one of the sticks from her inventory and skewered the mushroom on it. She didn’t really have another way to cook it, so she hoped it would be what the game wanted. If this didn’t count, and she ended up taking damage from eating the mushroom raw? Well, it probably wouldn’t kill her. But if she had to fight anything else before escaping back to the real world? Especially Otekah? It might be the end for her.
“As if it wasn’t bad enough that I have to eat mushrooms,” Tanisha complained, sulking as she turned the mushroom over as if cooking it evenly might improve the texture,” I might get hosed by wonky game mechanics. And die.” She gritted her teeth to suppress the shudder that ran through her at the thought of her own mortality. It wasn’t like she was talking about death in game, or some flippant social media comment made from a place of safety. She was talking about the end of her life. At least, according to Otekah.
Blowing out a steadying breath, Tanisha removed the mushroom from the flames. It had shrunk a bit during cooking, and it looked mushy and droopy. Gross. Being impaled on a stick she found on the ground didn’t make it any more appetizing. Steam rose off the cap, and it was blistered in some places, but just like everything else in this world, it didn’t really line up with where she’d let it rest in the flames.
“Guess we’re good, then.” She blew on the mushroom a few times, but the steam didn’t dissipate. With a shrug, Tanisha opened wide and bit it off the stick.
It was mushier than the other one, with a disgusting, spongy texture that was bad enough to make her almost retch the second she bit into it. The mushroom was hot, too, just bordering on uncomfortable, but she kept chewing with her face locked in a grimace. It was horrible, like eating a hot, wet pencil eraser. She chewed it only long enough to make sure she wasn’t going to choke, and then she finally swallowed.
The red bar in the corner refilled, even as she dry-heaved against the taste and texture.
“Huzzah,” Tanisha said, her voice drained of all emotion. “I get to live.” She rubbed at her tongue, as if she could scrub off her taste buds somehow. “But at what cost?”
In response, the quest text in the upper corner of her vision flashed, and then faded completely.
“What was that?” Her tongue forgotten, Tanisha looked around. “Am I free?”
A notification window popped up before her, answering her question.
You have completed the tutorial, unlocking your character sheet. During the tutorial, you should have earned enough skills to level up. Accessing your character sheet will allow you to choose which attribute to increase.
Tanisha reached out and dismissed the message with one hand, before opening her inventory. She noticed the screen had updated significantly since the last time she’d opened it just moments before. For one thing, the boxes in the lower left now showed the armor she was wearing, and the sword she had across her lap. Both of the boxes were tinted red, letting her know the durability on them was low. She wasn’t planning on staying in the game long enough to need them again, so she tossed the sword to the ground and wrestled the cracked armor off her person. It almost came apart in her hands, and Tanisha winced. How close had she come to dying in this stupid tutorial?
On the side of the screen, where the blueprint and inventory tab were located, there was now two more tabs. One of them was a little silhouette of a person’s face in profile, which Tanisha assumed was the character sheet. The other was a book. Curiosity won out, and Tanisha opened that menu.
What popped up looked like the blueprint menu, but only two items appeared on it. At the top was “Darkness Conquered,” and below it, “Welcome to the False Lands (completed)” in a slightly faded gray color. A quest log. If she was planning on staying here, she might find it useful. She could reference back to it, or perhaps have multiple quest objectives at once.
But Tanisha wasn’t planning on sticking around. She had to find Otekah, and then get out of here.
It didn’t even make sense for her to bother with her character sheet, but Tanisha figured that having a slight advantage when dealing with Otekah couldn’t hurt. So, she opened the character sheet and took a look. It was the exact same format as dARkness. With a glanced trained by too many months spent analyzing Koest’s sheet, Tanisha noted a few things.
First, she was entirely hosed. She had just barely reached Level 1 through the tutorial. If she ran into any serious resistance, it would shred her. With or without armor.
Second, she noticed that she was still being referred to as Koest. Tanisha wrinkled her nose. That wasn’t her name. Not that she’d never been referred to by her gamer handle outside of games before, but this wasn’t a game. Nor was it someone who knew her better as a pixelated character than as herself. If she was under threat of death here, they could have at least used her real name.
But before she could reach any other conclusions, a notification window popped up, letting her know she leveled and she needed to allocate her attribute point. Tanisha was irked that she got the message twice, but figured the first time was from the tutorial, whereas this was the notification she was more familiar with. In dARkness, leveling up gave a flat ten points to health, and then you could choose one other attribute—between stability, stamina, and hunger—to boost by ten points as well. Without hesitation, Tanisha poked the button labeled “stability.” The window closed without confirmation of her choice, but Tanisha didn’t regret it.
Stability in game was a
bit of a joke. Creatures—such as the Stick Folk—showed up and harassed you, sure, but there was no real negative to it, otherwise. But here… her short amount of time at low stability was enough to prove she didn’t want to go through that again.
The bars in the bottom left of her UI changed, and Tanisha shot her best glare at them. The formerly-full health bar and nearly-full stability bar now both had a tiny empty portion appended on them. “Of course,” Tanisha said loudly. “Of course! Because stat refills from level-ups were added in the week one update.” She turned her attention to the place where Otekah had disappeared. “Great system you have here! Would be a shame if, someone, I don’t know, updated it once and a while! Or ever!”
When she finished pouting, Tanisha turned her attention back to her character sheet and gave the actual skills a glance.
Name: Koest
Level: 1 (TNL: 01/10)
Hit Points: 200/210
Stability: 96/110
Hunger: 95/100
Stamina: 143/150
Butchering: 1 (0/21)
Fishing: 0 (0/10)
Herbalism: 2 (14/33)
Logging: 1 (18/21)
Mining: 0 (0/10)
Outfitting: 0 (4/10)
Construction: 0 (0/10)
Refining: 1 (2/21)
Survival: 0 (4/10)
Toolmaking: 0 (2/10)
Weaponmaking: 0 (2/10)
Axe: 1 (0/21)
Bow: 0 (0/10)
Dagger: 0 (0/10)
Hammer: 0 (0/10)
Machete: 0 (0/10)
Pick: 0 (0/10)
Shovel: 0 (0/10)
Spear: 0 (0/10)
Sword: 3 (26/46)
The whole thing was really quite depressing. Her skills were woefully underleveled, and it would be a grind to get anywhere. Tanisha knew that as she did things, the numbers in the parenthesis would tick up, and when the first number matched the second, she could get a skill up in that. Her TNL—to next level—would then go up by one, until those numbers matched, and then she would level up again.
“I mean, I guess it’s better than nothing,” she grumbled. “Easier to manage bars and grind skills than just get gutted by a crab claw.” Tanisha looked down at the splintered armor and cracked sword on the ground. “Or get eaten by saladmanders right when I spawn in.”
She took a deep breath and then dismissed the character sheet. None of this mattered. The point to her being here might have been Otekah’s strange obsession with survival rates, but Tanisha didn’t want to play along. She was free of the tutorial, and now nothing would stop her from leaving the grotto. From following Otekah.
Starting now, she was going home.
Chapter 17
With a final look around the grotto to make sure she hadn’t missed something important—and also, apparently, to note that the metalworking workbench had, in fact, despawned, although her woodworking workbench and fire still existed—Tanisha returned to the stone wall. It was here that the physical representation of the AI of dARkness: Online had vanished off into the woods, and where Tanisha would start her journey.
She directed the chair to lower itself to the ground so she could look for some sort of trail to follow. But there was nothing. No footprints, no disturbed underbrush. It was as if the AI had simply floated out, or covered their tracks.
But Tanisha wasn’t deterred. “They went this way,” she said to herself, “so I’ll just go this way as well.”
Otekah was an AI, after all. It would make sense that they would follow some ideal long-distance pathing. If their end goal, their “castle,” wasn’t directly in a straight line from where they’d vanished, it was only because there would be an obstacle in the way. Tanisha was confident she’d be able to proceed logically from that point, or find some sign of Otekah’s passing.
The area beyond the tutorial-necessary grotto was like the interior, much to Tanisha’s surprise. She’d been expecting some harsh zone line. But the creek to her left continued that way. The trees over there grew a little denser in that direction, but Tanisha wasn’t going to follow the water. Instead, she looked straight ahead. Off in the way Otekah had gone. There was no defined path, but she directed her chair forward just the same.
Now that she was in a larger, more open area, Tanisha found herself appreciating the strange mechanical chair. There was no nausea-inducing sway to its stride, and it tackled the uneven ground by adjusting the height of the legs to whatever was in her path. It made no logical sense, of course, but Tanisha was just starting to accept that. Nothing here made sense. But the ride was as smooth as if she were on fresh asphalt, and so Tanisha was thankful for the AI’s gift. Having to navigate these woods in even her outdoors chair would have been a nightmare.
The only thing she wished for was that the chair wasn’t so garish. White and blue didn’t exactly blend in anywhere. But without an option to customize it, she just had to accept the chair for what it was.
Of course, the engineer part of her brain urged her to pick the machine apart. She needed to know how it worked. The thing ran on fuel with no engine. It worked because the system told it to work. She wondered if the AI controlling its ability to navigate and listen to her was sentient, too, like Otekah. Or perhaps was even one of the AI’s subroutines.
That made Tanisha shudder. She didn’t want to imagine that Otekah could remove her ability to be mobile, if they determined it was necessary.
Thinking about the AI made Tanisha remember the other quest Otekah had given her. As she traveled, Tanisha expanded the quest text to get a better look.
Darkness Conquered: Find Otekah’s castle and face them there in order to return to Earth. The castle is located somewhere in the False Lands, accessible by finding and overcoming the obstacles that protect it. Otekah will await your arrival there, if you can survive. Once they have that answer, you will be allowed to leave the False Lands. The castle’s location is not obvious, and it will be difficult to find without assistance. In order to find it, it is recommended that you craft a compass, which will point you in the direction of your active quest objective. However, the compass is not necessary to complete this quest.
Tanisha immediately opened her inventory and popped open the crafting tab. A compass wasn’t something that existed in dARkness: Online, so she was curious how she’d go about making one. The blueprint for the compass was in the survival section, and she was surprised to see that it didn’t require any workstation to craft it.
It did require a metal sheet, which prompted Tanisha to look at how to craft a metalworking workbench. She discovered that it needed living stone and fur, two things she wasn’t exactly excited to see. They were obnoxious to farm in the game-version of dARkness, and so she had no reason to suspect they’d be any easier in the False Lands. It’d be just as bad, if not worse. Which made sense. Metalworking workbenches were the “endgame” of crafting tables in dARkness.
But Tanisha had no desire to stay in this world long enough to grind her way up that far.
The other thing that the compass required was a carcajou fang. This was slightly alarming, since Tanisha didn’t know what a carcajou was. She’d never heard of such a creature. Was it a normal animal she would come across with a little searching? Maybe it was a boss monster, spawned under specific conditions? Or was it an Uber? It had taken her a while to encounter the Uber Sleipdeer, and that had really only been a random lucky chance. If the compass was locked behind something based so firmly in RNG, she could just forget about ever crafting the stupid thing.
She also didn’t really want to deal with something she’d never seen before. Fear of the unknown was justified, all things considered. What if it was some thirty-foot-tall lizard monster with fangs the size of her arm?
Tanisha, once again, found herself missing the wiki.
She stared at the fang in the crafting menu for a while, tapping a finger to her front teeth. It likely wasn’t an Uber. That would be cruel, even for a kidnapping AI. It was likely a boss monster
spawn, since they were triggered. Something would need to be done—sometimes very intentionally—to cause them to spawn. There were a series of bosses in dARkness known as Zeni bosses because they were such difficult content. But they were added a few months ago, and so there’s no way the carcajou would be one of those.
“It does make sense, though,” Tanisha said, closing the crafting menu. “Otekah wants to see if I can survive. So making me spawn a boss monster and fight it again and again until it drops what I need… that’s pretty akin to survival. That’s hundreds of hours of farming materials and crafting weapons and armor.” She hesitated, looking down at her meager status bars. “And another few hundred hours of leveling, besides. No thank you.”
With the compass out of reach, Tanisha really only had “walking in this one direction” as her plan. She knew she could survive on the fly, if she had to. But she really hoped she could just ignore all of the elements of the game that she didn’t want to deal with, just to get to Otekah as fast as possible. Like speed running, just without glitch exploitations.
Not that she’d be above exploiting a few glitches, if she found them beneficial.
Tanisha looked at her surroundings as she traveled. She’d gone a few hundred feet in the direction Otekah went, and the forest had grown thinner, with more open areas that reminded Tanisha of meadows. There were sizable patches of crafting grass in these open spaces. Movement in between the trees alerted Tanisha to the presence of creatures that weren’t force-spawned to fight her, but nothing seemed interested in following her. This was a relatively tame forest, and the creatures present were the normal early-game fodder. They had no interest in her, and she—planning on leaving immediately—had no interest in them.
As she went, Tanisha saw a few familiar worker bees droning through the air around the thicker grass. She recognized them as no threat. They weren’t aggressive, unless you were messing around with the plants they were protecting, and they weren’t dangerous unless you were too close to their hive. Soldier bees would spawn to protect them, and those could pack a punch.
Darkness Named Page 12
