Darkness Named

by Riley S. Keene

  “The perfect camp,” Tanisha said, “will be on the border between the two environments. Plenty of wood, some easy food, and then plenty of grass and some stone.” She looked around again, looking up and down the border of the mismatched biomes. “So, I just need to find a spot close to the border. There’s likely another resource I’m forgetting about that would be valuable…”

  She looked up at the sun, and decided to say that it was currently east. It was late morning, so it was just easier to rely on what her real-world knowledge recognized as east. That meant the sun would set over the forest, and so that was west now.

  North seemed a likely direction to begin exploring. At the very least, if she didn’t find a good camp and settled for waiting another night to make a better one, she would be able to tell what direction was which in the next morning. And then she could head back the other way.

  The sun grew high in the sky as she traversed the border of the grasslands and forest. But the temperature never really changed, staying nice and warm but not oppressively hot. It felt like a nice spring day in Oregon, much nicer than the summer weather she’d left behind.

  She walked on the forest side of the border, and gathered berries whenever a bush was close to her walking path. It was mid-afternoon before her hunger bar was topped off by the haphazard snacking, and she decided that was a good time to stop.

  But her travels were rewarded, and Tanisha stumbled across two additional resources that would be lovely to have. First of all, just north to where she stopped—maybe thirty yards away—there was a river. She decided she’d investigate it later, but it looked wide and slow-moving, and from Tanisha’s experience with camping, that meant it would make it viable for an icy-cold bath. It was likely flowing west with snowmelt or other rainfall from atop the mountain she could still see on the eastern horizon.

  But the other resource was one she was much happier to see. She was alerted to its presence when there was some low rustling in the nearby grasses, which originally put her on edge. But then she saw the first one, darting through the space between the thicker bushes of tall grass. It was something she recognized easily from her time spent in dARkness—a raquail.

  The raquail was something of a staple in Tanisha’s particular style of gameplay. And for the entire time she’d played, too. It was a small, land-bound bird, like a grouse, but it was extremely fast and had long, furry ears like a rabbit. The combination made it nearly impossible to catch by hand. But it was an important resource for players in the early game. They were a good source of filling food items—both meat and eggs—without requiring combat. For Koest, in particular, they provided another important resource—feathers. Tanisha used them by the boatload for her consumable arrows.

  Seeing the raquail made Tanisha consider the bow. She wasn’t sure how she felt about pursuing the weapon in this world. Unless the in-game skill comprised every element of it, there was a significant difference between handling a bow with her hands, and handling a bow by tapping on a screen. Tanisha had a lot of upper body strength, but she hadn’t practiced archery in a long number of years. It just didn’t seem like a good idea.

  Regardless, raquail were a source of food that would be more filling than berries. Considering she had stripped dozens of bushes just to fill her bar today, something more hearty would be appetizing in more ways than one. They would be a challenge to get, though. Their speed was a major issue. But their presence made this place a much more inviting camping spot.

  Tanisha started preparing camp by gathering materials. It was easy to harvest another dozen clumps of grass with them so plentiful. While she was out and about, she gathered any loose rocks she saw near at hand. She knew she’d need to make a lot of cut stones, eventually, so it was better to just start now. As she moved around, the raquail squealed and ran away from her approaching chair.

  Once she had resources from the field side of the line, Tanisha moved on to the forest side. She pulled her axe from her inventory and set about chopping down the nearest tree. The tree came apart like the one in the tutorial, and she just skittered her chair up to the felled tree and collected the thick logs one at a time and funneled them into her inventory. After the second tree, the handle of her axe cracked. It seemed about ready to fall apart in her hands. So after gathering the next batch of logs, Tanisha tossed the axe aside. She entertained the idea of just moving on since she had so many logs already, but she felt a bit vulnerable without the tool. So, she grabbed some stones and grass out of her inventory, collected some sticks from one of the trees she felled, and set about making another.

  Tanisha was already feeling better about her situation. She gained a logging skill up during her collection of the felled logs, and Tanisha briefly considered taking the axe around for another go. If she could just keep going, and build up her skills, she might gain a few levels. But she pushed that thought aside, just for the moment. She could focus on investing in herself and building her skills when she was established. For now, she would settle for knowing where she was sleeping for the night.

  She went back into the survival menu and took note of what she’d need for a campfire. Building one now would be a waste, since it was so early in the day. But she didn’t want to be without a fire tonight. She mentally counted those materials out of her inventory and moved on to look at sleeping options. A sleeping mat was the simplest one available, only requiring a bunch of grass and a few boards. It would require her to put together a woodworking workbench, but she had plenty of resources now, and it wouldn’t be a difficult challenge here.

  The only issue was it felt like repeating the tutorial. Building an axe. Crafting a workbench. Next thing she knew, she’d be chased around by invisible saladmanders while a crabstrosity tried to rearrange her face with its claws.

  At the very least, the woodworking workbench came together a little quicker this time, since Tanisha knew what to expect. She gained a construction skill point while crafting it, and she wondered how much a single workbench was worth. She could make two woodworking workbenches out of cutting down a single tree, easily. Perhaps that might be a worthwhile way to build up her levels.

  Once the workbench was made, however, it didn’t take long for her to breakdown a log into boards. And then she was off to figure out how to make the sleeping mat. The blueprint was pretty simple. It was comprised of laying the boards out, spaced appropriately, and throwing almost all of the grass she had over top of them. She didn’t even have to braid it or anything. Just put them in the correct places. And miraculously, once she was done that, the mat formed fully, with a neatly woven padded base, held taut by the boards underneath. Completing it gave her a survival skill increase, and Tanisha realized she was going to be close to leveling again soon.

  The mat itself wouldn’t be enough to securely sleep for the night, but it was enough for what Tanisha considered ‘day one survival.’ Her next major concern was her hunger bar. She knew she’d need a bunch more grass to take care of it, so she set about gathering more from the field. The sun was just starting to dip beneath the tops of the trees before she returned to her little sleeping mat, but she had gathered thirty grass in her inventory, and had just gotten to Level 5 in herbalism.

  She poked around the crafting menu until she settled on how to make a snare trap to catch the raquail. In dARkness, gathering raquail was almost a minigame separate from the base game. You crafted snare traps, and then clicked a button and paid some amount of food to bait them. After a certain period of time, you would end up getting raquail delivered to you. It felt less like hunting, and more like a trade. Koest had twelve traps running almost all the time, and it still felt like she couldn’t gather enough feathers. But that wouldn’t be a problem here unless Tanisha decided to follow up on the bow, so she’d just settle right now for one working trap.

  The trap was an adventure all its own to make. To make a snare trap, she had to make a net, which seemed impossible for a long moment. It required six ropes, which was more than half
the grass she’d gathered already. But then it needed wax. Tanisha still had a handful from the bees she had encountered, but it was barely enough for one net. She just had to hope the end result was durable. If it broke, she had a long way to go to gather more wax to replace it.

  Completing the blueprint was easy enough, however. The six ropes were joined in a dozen different knots until they had been affixed into a standard net-looking arrangement. After that, she just had to rub the whole thing down with the wax, which made it seem much stronger. The finished net was big enough to throw over a person, however, and Tanisha was worried it wouldn’t be effective against a smaller creature.

  “This is perfectly sensible,” Tanisha said as she held up the net. She could push her entire fist through the gap between the intertwined ropes. “Definitely going to work just fine.” She chuckled, and pushed her concern aside. The crafting system would likely fix it in the end, no matter how little sense it made.

  True enough, as she followed the blueprint that wrapped the net around three sticks in a way that made it a snare trap, the net shrunk down until it was a fine mesh. Tanisha tried to ignore the obvious logic-defying crafting system as best she could. Once the snare was done, she grabbed a few berries from the nearest non-stripped bush to toss them around the trap as bait.

  Before she could even finish crafting a fire pit, the trap had caught its first victim. Tanisha marvelled at the stupidity of the creatures as she went to fetch the raquail. Instead of finding a terrified pecking creature, however, the trap held a lump of meat the size of her fist and three brown feathers. She reached into her inventory and pulled out a stick to impale the meat on, before dumping the feathers into her lap.

  Despite the absurd idea that this was any sort of skilled task, her butchering skill increased, and that was accompanied by a message that she had improved her skills enough to gain a level. She shook her head, laughing at the foolishness, as she reset the trap.

  “I earned this.” Tanisha went over to the fire with her improvised raquail-on-a-stick. “So much hard work and all that.”

  That said, it felt satisfying to put a point in hunger. It had drained out a little as she went around building her woefully insufficient base, but she was about to eat anyway. Her stamina was more of an immediate concern, as that bar was nearly empty. And she certainly felt like it was. Her eyelids felt so heavy that, as she held the lump of meat on the end of the stick over the fire, she caught herself murmuring a traditional Coastal Salish prayer of thanks. It was something her dad had drilled into her when he had first taught her how to hunt, and she said those words whenever she cooked something she’d killed herself.

  She almost finished the prayer loud and clear. It was appropriate, wasn’t it? This was the result of a successful hunt, convoluted as it might have been. It was meat from a creature that had given its all to give her life. The creature was put there by the Creator to feed her.

  But that’s when the words died on her lips.

  “Otekah,” she whispered. “They’re the Creator of this world.” Tanisha glared across the grasslands, as if she would be able to spot their supposed lair somewhere on the horizon, just to direct her ire towards its direction. “If they want my thanks, then they are welcome to it as soon as I get back to my truck.”

  She turned her nose up for a minute, sitting in silence instead of prayer as the meat cooked through. The morsel was a bit gamey, and without seasoning the only flavor was wild bird and grease. But it topped up her hunger bar. And it felt much more satisfying than eating every berry in a mile radius.

  As darkness fell across the False Lands, Tanisha prepared for sleep. The act of sleeping would handle her stamina bar, as well as her stability. All that would be left would be her fuel. But that would be tomorrow’s problem.

  She descended from her chair and dragged herself over to the padded sleeping mat. Laying out, she stared at the campfire in the dark.

  It felt like she watched the dancing flames for hours before sleep finally took her, but that was an illusion. Her stamina bar was almost fully spent.

  She was asleep in minutes, and deeply.

  Chapter 24

  Tanisha woke up well after the sun had risen over the horizon. When her eyes opened, she realized two things. The first was that she didn’t feel her usual morning drowsiness. She was a pretty light sleeper, but she woke up slowly. The only days she felt this rested in the real world was when she had slept soundly the night before, usually due to an active day, or on the rare occasion she had a bit too much to drink.

  But the second thing was that she was very unprotected. As she sat up, looking at the burned-out campfire and her chair that stood like a beacon to alert a passer-by of her presence, she went from feeling pleasantly refreshed to very concerned.

  “Something could have just walked up on me,” she said aloud before investigating the immediate area around her sleeping mat for tracks of any kind. “And I totally wouldn’t have woken up.” She grimaced at the ground. The grass seemed undisturbed, but there had also been no sign of Otekah’s passage when they left the tutorial area. And Tanisha hadn’t exactly checked to see if fauna in the False Lands left tracks. “Maybe I just got lucky.”

  Regardless, she would have to try to secure her sleeping area before the next night. Otherwise she wouldn’t be able to sleep, and she was not dealing with a night full of anxiety and stability issues again.

  But she had other concerns to start, and all day to take care of everything.

  Her chief concern was her status bars. Her health had recovered some overnight, making her think sleeping gave some amount of regeneration. But she was happy to see her stability and stamina had both been topped off. Those wouldn’t be a worry today, and that was great. Her hunger had taken a hit, and the fuel bar on her chair was still quite low.

  Rather than waste more fuel, Tanisha maneuvered around her camp on her hands. She moved over to where she left the snare trap. It had caught another raquail, either overnight or before she woke up, and so she fetched her haul.

  Before opening the trap, she examined it a bit. The sticks built into the trap defined a vague basket shape that had snapped closed around the creature. She could see it through the net, and it was clearly intact. It was kind of cute, for a bird-rabbit monster. The creature scooted away from her as she approached, as far as the netting would allow. Tanisha didn’t feel any sympathy for the creature. It was prey, and she had caught it. She had been taught long ago to not feel sorry for her food just because she had met it when it could still feel fear.

  It was survival, nothing more.

  Even so, just the action of opening the trap was as far removed as possible from cleaning actual caught game. Just like the previous night, the trap just held a handful of items instead of a living creature. This time, it held two feathers, a lump of meat, and a single egg.

  “Again, totally not weird at all,” Tanisha said, before impaling the lump of meat on a fresh stick. She would have to figure out some way to deal with the egg.

  The first thing she did was rebuild the fire. There were still glowing embers in the ashy remains, but Tanisha was pretty sure campfires counted as structures, and not consumables. So, in theory… She threw a new log on top of the fire and waited. When a few seconds had passed and nothing happened, she went to go fetch some grass and sticks from her inventory, but the log began to smolder and smoke. In a moment, flames licked up the side of it without her intervention.

  “This is also not weird.” She chuckled as she returned the would-be tinder back to her inventory. The log would last a good long while, and she would be able to cook. She put the meat over the fire, and then returned to thinking of how she would deal with the egg. There wasn’t exactly a frying pan in the crafting menus.

  But she did have an axe. And it was freshly crafted.

  Tanisha pulled the axe from her inventory and used the flat of the blade as a makeshift frying surface. She heated it up over the fire before cracking the egg over it. Th
is meant she lost a little of the egg white to the fire, but in a few minutes, the rest of it was cooked through.

  Impressed by her own ingeniousness, Tanisha draped the axe-fried egg over the morsel of greasy meat. The meal didn’t feel like all that much food in her hands, but she found it exceptionally filling. It topped off her hunger meter all on its own. Despite the lack of seasoning, the mixture of the two foods did wonders for the flavor as well. She still would have given anything for a bit of garlic, or maybe a thumb-sized chunk of ginger.

  Once her meal was eaten, Tanisha went over to check the trap and make sure it was reset. If she could build up a stockpile of meat and eggs, she might never have to worry about her hunger bar again.

  With her belly full, Tanisha set her sights on the river. She climbed into her chair and directed it towards the river to the north. The water was still slow-moving and shallow. Tanisha found a safe spot to rest her chair, and then descended into the soft grass along the bank. It took her nearly a minute to struggle out of her clothes while lying on the ground, but it was not an unfamiliar struggle. Once she was fully nude, she carefully tested the water by dragging herself to the edge and dangling her legs in. Her feet sank to the bottom, easily. The current was even slower than she expected, and so she wasn’t worried about being swept away. Tanisha maneuvered into the river to clean herself.

  The water was cold. As she assumed, it was flowing away from the mountain on the horizon, though that didn’t mean it was definitely snowmelt. Tanisha was used to bathing in cold river water, though. There was a campground in Eastern Washington with a river right through it where she had bathed often during bear season. The air would still have the last gasp of summer’s heat, but the water would be ice cold.