This was good. The antlers would fortify her camp from any wandering monsters, and the hide would be stored for now.
And the meat—oh this mountain of meat. She could craft ten more drying racks, and keep the whole lot of them running non-stop for a week. While ignoring her raquail traps. And she still might lose some to rot. She could spend a lot more time—even more, if she made a few lean-tos from the hide—away from the camp, gathering materials and scouting the area.
Heck, she could spend days straight gathering stone and murdering rock lizards so that she could build a real wall around her camp. And a building to secure her workbenches. And maybe she could even start a hunt for the materials for a metalworking workbench so she could put the ore she mined to use. A few metal sheets was all it took for metal armor. With a real wall, and some traps about, along with a huge stockpile of meat and jerky, she could hunker down and plan her next moves in peace.
Was that what she wanted, though?
It sounded great, in theory. But it wasn’t. Not if she wanted to leave the False Lands.
“This isn’t supposed to be my life,” she said to Shinji. He chirruped at her curiously, but she furrowed her brow and closed the crafting menu. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
She was falling into a trap. Not playing the game—ignoring the rules and mechanics—got her nowhere. But playing the game was causing her to lose sight of the passage of time. She didn’t even have the usual release of needing to step away from the screen to eat, sleep, or use the restroom. When she went to eat, it was “in game.” When she went to sleep, the same. And that was the trap.
Playing the game—letting herself gather resources, or fortify her camp—was making her lose sight of what she really wanted. She didn’t even feel lonely. As much as she was an introvert, if she was all by herself, she would eventually join the Eris voice server to look for someone to converse with. Talking to herself only did so much. And while she didn’t think of Shinji himself as malicious, the presence of the little guy was more than enough to keep her from missing other people.
It was carefully constructed, like many games, to suck her in and keep her trapped in an endless cycle of planning, gathering, processing, and building. She had to get out. To get back to the real world.
But why?
The thought came to her, unbidden, and for a moment she thought it was Otekah themselves, trying to sabotage her. But Tanisha was alone, in both physical and mental space.
“But even if it were Otekah, the question is still a good one. Why do I want to go back so bad?”
Shinji looked up at her, licking his chops and giving a cheerful squeak.
Tanisha frowned at him. “I don’t have any pets in the real world. I’m single, living off savings, and while I’ve been living right down the road from my parents for six months, I haven’t even told them I’m in the same state. All of my friends are just online acquaintances. Sure, I have a handful of plants in the community garden that depend on me for survival, but I’m sure someone would take over. I completely own my tiny house, and even my truck is paid off.”
From beside her, Shinji chittered and dropped to all fours. He darted quickly in between the legs of her chair, coming to rest on her left side. But he offered no other response.
“Is my real life any better than this one?” She looked up to the sky, where it was darkening towards evening. “Even there, all I’m doing is… surviving. There are no challenges. No interruptions. Just… existence.” She shook her head, and a heavy cloud fell over her. “If that’s what I’m going back to, I’d be better off staying here. At least I’d have something to do with my life again.”
The creature beyond the legs of her chair didn’t respond. He looked at her with his little black eyes, but stayed silent, as if sensing her distress.
“I miss being an engineer.” The wistful words furrowed her brow, both to hear them in her own voice, but also to feel the truth of them in her heart. She said the opposite thing so many times to so many people, and had meant it then. “I miss being challenged,” she said quickly, almost as a correction. Even though the first thing wasn’t a lie. “I miss having a real life. Getting up in the morning to do something that would improve the lives of others. I miss… doing things. Being human.”
Shinji just continued staring at her. She felt better, just for having his attention. Even if he didn’t understand her. Because this was one of the things she missed. She didn’t really have anyone to talk to like this. Friends online would be interested in game lore or stories, or perhaps things like books and movies. But they never wanted to talk about anything of substance, because Tanisha kept them at arm’s length. She never talked about how she isolated herself in a tiny house six hours from her friends. How she didn’t tell her parents about the move.
She never mentioned how she struggled for weeks. How she lived out of her truck for nearly a month. All just to escape when things got hard.
“Alright,” Tanisha said, shaking her head. “No more of this. Things are going to change.” She smiled down at Shinji. A bit of confidence welled up in her as he visibly reacted to her smile. “I’m going to get things back in order.” She scratched her head. “I’m not sure how, yet, but I’ll get there. Maybe I’ll go back to Seattle, but maybe not. Doesn’t matter. I’m going to do something with my life. I could start my own business. My own engineering firm.”
She looked back up at the sky, watching as it faded closer to darkness. Without hesitation, she pulled a torch from her inventory. “It doesn’t matter. In the end, I need to get out of here first.
“And nothing’s going to stop me now.”
Chapter 33
Another sunrise in the False Lands, and Tanisha hoped it would be one of her last few. She had spent the whole night, after dinner, thinking about how she would plan her next move. And one of those things was related to her clay pots and the benefits they allowed when it came to her inventory space.
Other players would need to carefully manage their inventory when traveling long distances. The space Tanisha would save by keeping her tools and weapons in pots would save her half-a-dozen inventory slots easily, and let her carry duplicates as well. Additionally, things like rocks were fair game for the exploit. She could also experiment a bit with things like tents. They were made of all organic materials, since they were just sticks, rope, and cloth or hide. Would the pot try and turn it into fuel if she just threw a rock in the bottom of the pot? Worse case scenario, she’d have extra fuel, which she’d need anyway.
Once her morning routine was done, and the three levels worth of points from the previous night divided up between stability and hunger, Tanisha started making more drying racks. With her massive stockpile of meat from the sleipdeer, the more she could turn into jerky, the better. It would last quite a while in her inventory, and fill in the gaps when she couldn’t find any game to hunt.
Having to wait for the drying racks put a timeline to her preparations, which was fine by Tanisha. With four more of the things, it would take four cycles to get through all of the sleipdeer meat. That was a week, maximum. She could take that week to do research and experimentation, figure out what materials she wanted to gather and collect, and study her surroundings. And after that, she could search for Otekah’s castle.
Tanisha opened her crafting menu and stared at the entry for the compass. Her quest log had told her that the item would point her towards her active quest objective. And she had a quest for tracking down the AI’s lair. But she still hadn’t come across a carcajou fang. It left her frustrated. What could she do about it? It wasn’t like she could check the wiki or even ask the Eris server. She’d never heard of it before, and she knew most of the items in the game by name. It wasn’t even like there was an in-game resource she could consult.
“It has to come from a beast of some sort,” she said, trying to get her thoughts in order. “And it’s most likely a boss monster. Something really nasty, spawned under some really obnoxious con
ditions.” She looked over to Shinji, who was sitting nearby, cleaning himself fastidiously. “It could be anything. If Otekah is intending on keeping people here, they would make it something no one would ever try, or even be capable of. Like some kind of old-school videogame urban legend, where you have to run two-thousand laps around a specific landmark to unlock a character.” She hesitated and grimaced. “Or it’s something really uncomfortable. A leap of faith that should kill me. Maybe something morally reprehensible, like finding another player and ritually sacrificing them.”
Shinji looked up at that. He wiggled his ear and made a dooking sound, before he flipped his flexible neck around to gnaw at his shoulder blade, either itching it or cleaning it.
“Maybe other people are the solution, though.” Tanisha rested her chin against her closed fist. “In the real world, I’d ask other people. They populate the wiki, and they are on the Eris server. I might even be able to find people who have one already.”
As if in response to her thoughts, her UI flickered.
Group Up: Find other people in the False Lands.
“Oh, of course.” Tanisha didn’t even wait for it to expand before she rolled her eyes. “That’s super helpful.” She sighed before glaring at the notification to see if it would expand out into something actually useful.
Group Up: Find other people in the False Lands. You aren’t the only human survivor in this world who is looking to escape. It is more efficient to pool resources in a group, assigning tasks and sharing the load. Even if you don’t intend to join together, it can be valuable to exchange information about the world and your surroundings, as well as trade goods. Individual players tend to spawn far apart, and so it may be difficult to locate others. Explore the world, and keep in mind that resources might attract other players, especially food sources.
“Not… actually any better.” She closed the UI element with a frustrated sigh, before gesturing angrily at the mountains to the east. “Because having that as an active quest is so useful. I could totally use the compass I don’t have to find people who can help me get the compass in the first place. Instead—novel concept, this—perhaps there should be a quest to get the carcajou fang? Or to make the compass in general? And only if the quest text is going to actually help, because if it doesn’t, I’d still need the compass to make the quest system worth literally a single damn thing!”
Nothing happened. No quest. And no response from the False Lands, other than the whisper of the wind through the grasslands and the distant chittering of creatures. There was no unseen developer watching her, or, if Otekah was watching, they were unmoved by her pleas. No telling which.
“Alright. Slight change of plans. I’m not going to look for Otekah’s secret hideout right now.” She looked around her camp. “This quest, at least, has some logic to it. Otekah could be straight up anywhere. There could be an invisible stairway right above my head that leads to their flying castle. But people? Regular humans like me? They have to be somewhere I can get to, and if they want to survive, they have to be somewhere with access to food, water, and wood.”
Shinji got to her furry little feet and sauntered over to her with an inquisitive squeak.
“Right. We get our stuff together. Pack up what we need, and prepare for a long trek. And then follow the river.”
The mustelan tilted his head and chittered at her.
“Yep,” she said, as if he had raised an actual question. “We’d better get ready, buddy.”
The first thing she had to do was plan. As she already learned, she could travel for at least two days before needing to deal with her stamina bar. Maybe three, if she didn’t run. Every tent extended her travel range by another two to three days, as long as she had fuel. And she could keep one pot of sticks rolling non-stop to keep the tank topped off. She just needed her inventory full of usable organic material, as well as the food, torches, and tents.
“Food is taken care of,” Tanisha said, looking at the drying racks. They were already hard at work, despite the logical nonsense of raw meat being preserved by simple exposure to air. “So, then all I need to work on is the fuel, torches, and tents.”
She’d need four sticks and two rope for every two hides in order to make the tents, not to mention the grass and sticks she’d need for more torches. It meant there was a ton of overlap. She’d likely need hundreds of grass and sticks total.
Tanisha looked out over the grasslands ahead of her, and then the woods behind her, before returning to attention to the drying rack. Her mind was whirling a mile a minute, calculating out exactly how to accomplish this.
“Eight days.”
Shinji chittered, and Tanisha smiled down at the little creature before patting him on the head. “Eight days of drying meat, and then we’re gone. Everything that doesn’t go into torches or tents is going into a pot for fuel. Let’s motor.”
Chapter 34
No matter how much tents and torches would expand her travel range, Tanisha knew her first focus was going to be tools. The high-quality hammer had taken on more enemies than she’d have trusted a normal-quality one to handle, and it still looked to have a lot of life left in it. If she could get a high-quality version of each tool crafted, then she would be able to limit herself to one pot of tools, and have a decently-leveled toolmaking skill besides.
After crafting two normal-quality axes, her toolmaking skill increased. And after two more crafts, she had her first high-quality. The twenty-first pickaxe craft produced a high-quality version, and Tanisha grimaced at how slow the leveling process was. Half of her reason for spending her effort on this was for the experience gain. But then again, if it was really about grinding levels, she wouldn’t be letting Shinji cut the stone and weave the ropes for her. High-quality tools would have to be their own reward, then.
She thought about it for a moment, and then went on crafting more tools. This time she was looking for a high-quality shovel. She didn’t know what effect a good shovel would have, but it was worth it just to have one. Crafting shovels rewarded her a level of toolmaking after only a handful of crafts, and then, nine shovels later, she had another high-quality tool to add to her collection.
Tanisha looked over the other tools in her crafting menu, and then down at the pile of “useless” normal-quality tools scattered around her camp. Despite the slowness of leveling up her toolmaking skill, that wasn’t about to change anytime soon. Every bit of experience was a step towards shortening the grind to the next high-quality proc.
The only tool she’d never made a single one of was the machete. It was used to gather plants, and would speed up harvesting by a small amount. As much as it wasn’t required to gather grass, Tanisha was going to need a lot of the material for her upcoming trip. And so she got to work on making one of those as well.
It only took thirteen—still the same, boring process of tying a rock to a stick and watching the blueprint system shape the tool into a workable form—before she had her high-quality machete.
The last tool she wanted to craft was actually a duplicate. Her hammer was great, but eventually it would break. And she wanted to have a backup to fall on. Nine normal-quality hammers hit the pile before the tenth came out with that unknown property that told her it was what she needed.
“Too much crafting,” Tanisha murmured as she pulled the pot of tools out of her inventory. She dumped her previous normal-quality tools out into the pile around her mech, and replaced them with the high-quality upgrades. When they were safely stowed in her inventory, she regarded the mess she’d made of her camp. “Hm. I should make sure to save some of these.”
Tanisha directed her chair over to the collection of spare pots and dragged five of them to the pile. She had to climb down out of her chair to dig through the pile of tools properly, but she sorted the tools into the pots. One of each tool into each pot. Like a set. “Any time I need to use a tool, I’ll grab one of these instead of wearing down the resources I’ll be taking with me on the journey.”
> It made sense. And would save her better tools for the harder stuff.
As she sorted the tools, she was struck by exactly how many pickaxes she had to make over every other tool. She wondered if she could take a bunch of them out to the foothills to gather more stone. But she put the thought aside with a shake of her head. The number of each tool she had was determined entirely by Random Number Generator, not some malicious external force looking to waste her time and resources. It was true that this crafting endeavor had left her with only a half-dozen stones, but she wasn’t going to need more for a while. She had enough tools, and she wasn’t going to need to build up her walls over the next eight days.
Since it was still relatively early in the day, Tanisha devoted the rest of the daylight to wearing down the normal-quality tools that hadn’t made it into the clay pots. She started with the machetes, since she wasn’t sure how effective they’d be. Since arriving in the False Lands, she’d just grabbed the grass and torn it up. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.
Gathering grass with the machete wasn’t just faster, it was easier. All she had to do was get a good handful of the material and then run the vaguely-sharp stone edge across the taught grass. It parted like mists. She didn’t even have to climb down out of her chair anymore, and was just content to lean over the side of it. No clump of grass was too stubborn to deal with, or accidentally came up with its roots as well. It doubled her collection speed, and one machete seemed to last for about an hour of moving through the grasslands. That hour was extremely productive. Tanisha gathered hundreds of clumps of grass.
Darkness Named Page 24
