Darkness Named

by Riley S. Keene

  She missed her bottle of shampoo and bar of soap. The lack of a towel to dry off on didn't bother her too much, but she worried that bathing wouldn’t accomplish much without the usual trappings. Even so, it was an important part of her morning ritual. The bath would center her mentally, and the familiar feeling of icy river water on her skin put her in the mindset of being out camping.

  Despite the lack of soap, she watched the dirt and grime wash downriver as she scrubbed at her skin with bare hands. There was even a bit of dried blood, and Tanisha surmised it was likely from her fight against the saladmanders. But there had been no cuts on her body, and no sign of physical injury. If there had been, it would have been bruising, not blood-shedding cuts. Did damage just teleport blood to the outside of her body?

  It didn’t make sense, but Tanisha just silenced the engineer part of her brain before its complaints could turn into anxiety. This was a very strange world, but it was one she had to learn to deal with until she could escape it.

  To fill the silence, Tanisha hummed a traditional worksong her parents had taught her. She didn’t know the words—and wouldn’t know how to pronounce them even if she did—as Salish was a lost language. But she knew the tune, and she loved the sound of it.

  Tanisha pulled herself from the river when she finally felt clean enough. She shook herself off and squeezed the water out of her hair before stretching out on the grass along the bank. It wasn’t like she could afford to wait for the sun to dry her fully—the weather wasn’t nearly hot enough for that to be a quick thing—but she wanted a minute to dig through the crafting menus to see what she could do to make the morning ritual more convenient.

  “Of course,” she muttered as she looked over the crafting requirements for cloth. It only required grass, but it needed a workbench. One she didn’t have anywhere near the materials required for. “Of course!” Tanisha made a rude gesture to the sky, as if Otekah would see it. “I need all kinds of mob drops for this! Of course I do.” She shook her head. “Perfectly fair.”

  Her dreams of a towel considerably complicated, Tanisha struggled back into her clothes. She considered all of the other comforts she would have to live without—deodorant, toilet paper, and even toothbrushes and floss—and found herself actually worried. Not that she seemed to need to empty her bladder or bowels here, which was super weird on its own. But she was an outdoorswoman. She had made fun of plenty of city folks for their dependence on the comforts afforded to them by proximity to a department store. And here she was, lamenting the things she would buy there herself. It was hypocritical at best, and downright snobbish at worst.

  “Guess I’ll just have to stop that, then. Doesn’t mean I have any less need for cloth, and I guess I should make that a bit of a higher priority on the list. A number of comforts to be had just by having access to cloth and clean water.”

  Once dressed and back in her leggy mechanical chair, she opened her crafting menu again. The only bar still low was her fuel, which was edging dangerously close to empty. The tutorial had told her it needed her to make a clay pot to get fuel, so Tanisha scoped that out. It was under the survival section of the menu.

  “Super easy. I just need some clay and a campfire.” She turned her chair back towards camp, where she could still see the log burning bright. “Campfire is an obvious check. Just need to find the clay.”

  Tanisha shifted to the tools part of the crafting menu, and went about looking for an appropriate tool for the task. A cut stone and rope later, she opened the blueprint for a shovel. The steps to make it were nearly identical to those for an axe. But like with the axe, the stone head of the tool took on a new shape as soon as the craft was finished, and so instead of an axe, she had a rough trowel. She experimented with putting it into her inventory, and was chagrined to find that it took up its own slot, refusing to stack with her axe. Not unexpected, but super inconvenient. It would mean she’d need to be picky about the tools she carried around, since she didn’t exactly have the world’s biggest inventory.

  “In theory, I should be able to find clay around here.” She turned her chair back to the river and looked up and down the bank. What she wanted was bare earth. “Anywhere without plants,” she added.

  With that in mind, she turned her chair east, towards the grasslands, and urged it forward. But slowly. While she was sure the bank there was likely to have spots she could dig at, it wouldn’t do her any good to use more fuel than necessary.

  She didn’t want it running out before she could refill it.

  Chapter 25

  She searched for nearly an hour. There were no clay deposits.

  Tanisha began to worry.

  Her fuel bar was barely more than a sliver now, and she was anxious that she might be finishing the hunt for clay by dragging herself along on her hands.

  She eventually stopped in an effort to conserve fuel as she went over what she knew about clay. It wasn’t a resource in dARkness: Online, so she had to fall back on her real-life experiences. Most of her memories were in the distant past, and they were tainted by elementary school days. Other kids at the local public schools would refer to the crumbly reddish substance they could dig up on the playground as “indian clay” and would smear it across their cheeks. Not out of malice, but out of miseducation.

  Tanisha tried to focus on the details. The clay they’d used was basically just wet sand. A more malleable dirt, usually identifiable by its coloring. But was it ever on the surface without the aid of erosion? Logically, wouldn’t it need to be beneath the water table?

  She looked down at the ground beyond her feet. There was a patch of bare earth where no grass grew. Was that all she needed? Did she just need to use the shovel there to harvest clay? She had expected it to be obvious, but the spot where there was no grass was not necessarily inconspicuous.

  Tanisha climbed down off the chair and pulled the shovel from her inventory. The ground felt hard under her, but just as the axe bit into the trees, the shovel seemed to dig in with supernatural ease as soon as it pierced the hard-packed dirt.

  In under a minute, she had a good-sized hole in the earth next to the river bank, and a minute after that, the tip of her shovel came away wet as the bottom of her hole reached the water level.

  “Here we go,” Tanisa said, nodding emphatically. “I guess some things around here do make logical sense.”

  She cleared away some of the dry dirt to reveal the clay. It was a yellowish-gray, as it was slightly discolored from the dirt that had surrounded it. As she scooped it out of the ground with her primitive shovel, it came out smooth and malleable, like what she’d seen in movies on pottery wheels, rather than what she expected to find raw in nature. Tanisha wondered if this was influenced by a programmer, rather than Otekah. Perhaps clay was originally going to be a resource that was just forgotten? Or did Otekah have access to the internet, and thus could stream video while they kidnapped and murdered normal folk?

  Regardless, Tanisha cursed at her previous misconceptions. She lost an hour over looking for an idealized version of clay. Not to mention so much fuel.

  Tanisha took the chunk of clay in her hands, testing it. It was firm and supple, but it shaped easily with a little pressure. The clay even seemed to hold shape when she let it go. It only sagged a little. This was like someone went to a craft store, bought polymer clay, and then just threw it into a hole in the ground here.

  And now that she had the clay, she needed to craft it into a clay pot. She wasn’t sure how that was going to work. The crafting blueprint had only required one “unit” of clay, however much that was. But she didn’t know if she was going to need more than one pot, or if she’d be able to keep reusing it. Would it have durability, like her other tools? And what if it was fragile? Would it have a non-zero failure chance?

  There was no substance or craft in dARkness: Online that she could compare it to. She had no frame of reference. And since she didn’t know, she decided she would rather be over-prepared than under-prepared.
>
  Tanisha put the first lump of clay into a slot in her inventory, and then she bent back down over the hole she dug to collect more. She didn’t close her inventory, and just shoved the next lump in as well. Tanisha worked to clear away more of the dry dirt layer to give herself easier access to the clay.

  All told, she spent almost half an hour with her hands in the dirt, before she realized she had twelve units of clay. If she needed more than that, it was going to be a more constant problem than she was ever going to deal with. At that point, she’d need to start looking at how to make sturdy gloves so she could just walk around on her hands more.

  She washed her hands off in the river before returning to her chair. The clay and dirt was whisked away quickly, just like before. And once she was clean, she was able to climb back up in her chair and return to camp. The clay pot blueprint required a campfire, and it seemed to be more resource-efficient to add more fuel to the fire she already had, instead of building a new one. It was faster going without stopping at every patch of bare earth and looking for discolored veins in the ground, but she still had to cover quite the distance.

  As she went, she kept a close eye on her fuel bar. As the indicator became a sliver, the ride grew a bit bumpy. The legs started to get sluggish, reacting too slowly to smaller obstacles and deviations in the ground’s height. Tanisha also noted that the pace was considerably slower. She tried to milk it for everything it had though, even going as far as to move her hands as if she were guiding the wheels of one of her more familiar chairs. It was disorienting to give orders with physical motions and receive no physical feedback or response. Like she was turning a steering wheel but the vehicle continued going straight.

  It was almost a relief when the chair came to a full, shuddering stop about twenty yards from her camp. At least she could see the low-burning campfire ahead of her, and she wouldn’t need to move through the high grass, hoping she was moving in the right direction.

  Tanisha wasn’t sluggish on her hands. A lot of people believed that a disabled person was helpless without their chair, but that simply wasn’t true. Sure, she couldn’t match a full two-legged sprint while she was dragging her feet behind her. But her arms were much more muscular and developed than those of the average able-bodied person, not to mention her core muscles. And not just that. She’d spent years practicing. As such, closing the distance to her fire was a breeze.

  She dragged herself over to the fire at a solid walking pace. Once there, she arranged herself next to the fire and opened the crafting blueprint for the clay pot.

  Crafting the vessel was a bit clunky. It had the feeling of something that had been modded into the game. The clay itself seemed to stick in the right positions when she shaped it, and it sloughed off easily where there was excess. Where the other crafts had come together easily by morphing under her hands, this seemed to be done in a different style. Otekah must have designed this just for her.

  “It’s not that weird,” she said as she shaped the pot carefully. “There are all sorts of other allowances a person might need. Glasses, or leg braces. Crutches. Medication.” She shrugged and leaned back to look at her creation. “I wonder what abled-bodied people get instead.”

  She grimaced. A part of her wanted to believe that abled-bodied people wouldn’t get anything. They wouldn’t require it to be functional. But she knew that wouldn’t be the case. Able-bodied folks would riot if a disabled person got something and they got nothing. And they would likely get something that reflected their personality.

  That irked her. Tanisha used a wheelchair, but that wasn’t who she was. Any other engineer might get some bonus to building constructions, or any other hunter might get a special rifle. But instead, here she was with this white-and-blue eyesore. Just because she couldn’t walk.

  She looked over to the chair and felt immediately guilty about the insult. Regardless of the color scheme, it had been pretty satisfying to ride around on a sci-fi mech. It was easier than using a wheelchair in such untouched nature, and its unnatural grace had kept her from spilling out of it. A wheelchair would have toppled over, and even an able-bodied person would trip.

  It had even sprinted through the forest at night without slamming her into a tree.

  She frowned at that, pausing as she shaped the neck of the pot. She had run all night with it. In fact, she had been awake for two full days without sleep. Despite serving as her means of locomotion, the chair gave a significant advantage to her stamina bar. It meant she would be able to get so much more done in a day than other players. If she were just doing overland travel, she now knew all she needed were torches for overnight, and she could keep going for days without sleep. She would be able to hunt for Otekah’s castle much easier.

  And it was a convenient place to store and hold items instead of in her limited inventory space. That in itself would be enough of an advantage.

  Tanisha finished the craft. As she did, she realized something else. The tutorial message said that pots were only craftable by those who required them, so they might offer additional advantages. A pot could be used for quite a bit. And this one was about the size of a liter bottle of soda, and in spite of her earlier worries, it seemed pretty solid and sturdy. Upon completion of the pot and the lid, they had hardened instantly as if they had been fired in a kiln.

  The tutorial had told her any organic matter would ferment into fuel, and that made her suspicious. Organic material was not a category of items in dARkness: Online, and so she could have to guess what it would accept. Obviously it would probably take food, but would it accept literally anything organic?

  Tanisha opened her inventory and grabbed a bunch of sticks. They were the easiest thing to gather, since cutting down a tree seemed to produce at least a dozen of them. So, if they would work, it might be a really cost-efficient resource to use.

  The sticks all fit inside the narrow mouth of the pot, and after putting about a dozen or so inside, she put the lid on.

  For a long moment, nothing happened. But once she took her hand off the lid, it started to shake slightly, as if water were boiling inside. The lid began to dance as steam escaped around it.

  Tanisha frowned and snatched the lid off it, before peeking inside. There were just sticks in there. No water or steam. She put the lid back on, and once she took her hands off it, the pot started shaking again. Tentatively, Tanisha reached out and touched the sides. There was no warmth, and the shaking didn’t stop. It was just a faint vibration against her hand.

  “That’s probably fine.” She put the pot in her inventory, unsure of what to do with it otherwise. “If it explodes in here, it probably won’t kill me, at least. I’ll just… um, check back.”

  Tanisha retrieved a second lump of clay and opened the blueprint again so she could make another pot. Clay didn’t seem to have any other purpose, and so there was no harm in making more. It was in the survival section of the menu, so she knew she was at least getting experience from the craft.

  She dubbed the second pot the one for all her experiments as she finished the lid and it magically fired itself into a completed ceramic.

  The first thing she did was try to stack it with the pot already in her inventory. She grimaced when the system refused. Was it because this one was empty? Or did they just not stack? It was an inconvenience, but there were other things she could do with it, right?

  She set the pot down in front of her and stared at it. What could it do? As a storage device, it was flawed. Obviously, if she put anything organic in it, the pot would try to ferment it into fuel. That made it a really poor choice for safely storing food or materials. She could fill it with stone, but that didn’t exactly help. Stones stacked, and so they filled a single space in her inventory.

  Tanisha blew out a frustrated breath and went to close her inventory, but she paused. The axe and shovel both took up a full slot each. And that was despite them being smaller than the clay pot. The stone heads of the tools meant they weren’t entire organic, too.
r />   She pulled them out and examined them. The heads of the tools would fit through the mouth of the pot. She just put the shovel in, since there wasn’t really a great need for it in the future. “Here goes nothing,” she said, putting the lid gingerly in place. “Or, more possibly, one shovel?” She released the lid and waited.

  Nothing happened. She waited a moment more, but there was still nothing. No vibration, and no strange smoke. She opened the clay pot and looked inside. The shovel was there, unharmed. She drew it out. Put it back. Then put the axe in next to it.

  She almost expected the axe to refuse to share the pot with the shovel, the same way it had refused to share an inventory slot. But it went in easily, and she put the lid on. It still didn't begin to vibrate. “For my next trick, I will make these tools disappear!” She lifted the pot and put it into her inventory, right in the same slot the axe had been in a moment before. The inventory system accepted it readily. Neither the axe or shovel popped out and fell to the ground. Nor did they appear in adjacent inventory slots.

  “The real magic is making them come back. Any rube can make something vanish.” She pulled the pot back out of her inventory and opened it. Both tools were still inside. Intact, just as she’d left them.

  “Houston,” she said with a grin, “we have an exploit.”

  Chapter 26

  Tanisha focused on making the rest of her clay into pots while she waited for the first to finish vibrating ominously. All of the crafting got her a survival skill increase, so even if she didn’t end up using the pots, she still got something out of the effort. And she was able to complete them before the fire went out. Saving resources, one fire at a time.