The next morning, I was more or less good as new. I mean, I was crusty as fuck from caked-on rodent gore, but aside from that, I felt like a million bucks. I awoke to birds chirping, the scent of fresh prairie air and wildflowers, and the soothing bubbling of the nearby river. My ears must have healed overnight, I thought, relieved that I wouldn’t have to chug one of the few healing potions I possessed. Honestly, if it weren’t for the lingering taste of Burrow Tyrant blood in my mouth, it would have been a perfect morning. But it wasn’t the first time I’d woken up with a bad taste in my mouth, so I tried not to let it ruin the day for me.
I decided to get up and try to wash myself off in the river. After a leisurely stretch outside of the tent, I touched it and popped it back into my inventory. That particular little trick was quickly becoming my favorite thing about this world. I could just put something like the tent away in spatial storage and take it back out later without needing to tear it down and set it back up every time I used it. It was camping on easy mode.
At the river, I dipped a toe into the water to gauge its temperature. It wasn’t exactly icy, but I was positive I was in for an invigorating experience. I just wished I had some soap. I could smell myself and I knew from experience that I wasn’t getting rid of that odor by just rinsing. Plus, blood stains. How was I going to get all this gunk out of my LL Bean fleece? I loved this fleece.
Sighing, I decided to just take everything off and take the plunge. So, I glanced around to make sure nobody was going to see me and, once I was satisfied that I was alone, I stripped and stepped gingerly into the brisk water. As I began to scoop water up and splash myself with it, a tooltip appeared.
My eyebrows furrowed in confusion as I pressed in affirmation of my consent to bathe…which I thought I was already doing, but what did I know? Apparently not much, as the water suddenly became much more effective at removing the grime from my body. It was so effective, in fact, that I decided to sit down and just let the current do the work for me. Odd, given the mildly disturbing message from The System. Still, even a temporary little boost to Intelligence was totally worth lounging around naked in what was apparently just a giant fish toilet.
As I sat there soaking up the early morning sun, legs sprawled out, my back pressed up against the riverbank, arms dangling over the edge like I was in my own private little cold plunge, I noticed a ping on one of my menus. I opened up the UI and found that Environmental Mapping was picking up movement not far from where I sat. I tried to look around without being super obvious about it, and within a few moments I found myself making eye contact with what appeared to be a semi-transparent young woman dressed in some sort of old-fashioned farm dress and bonnet.
Her eyes went wide and she disappeared for a second before reappearing in the same exact spot. She did this several times, flickering in and out of sight like someone was playing with her On/Off switch. I used Threat Assessment on her:
Try not to scare her? I thought, What about me?
“Hey,” I said, trying to maintain some semblance of dignity, “you know I can see you over there, right?”
The on/off flickering intensified and she began speaking back to me. I didn’t know if it was the distance, or if she was speaking a different language, but I genuinely could not understand a word she was saying.
Fuck it, I thought, she’s already seen everything there is to see. So I stood up slowly, grabbed my pants, and started to walk across the river toward her. Both her speech and the flickering sped up as she tried ineffectually to hide behind the bush she had been spying on me from. As I got closer, I could make out more of what she was saying, but…yep. That was definitely an alien language. Suddenly, I stepped into a deep spot in the river and sank like a rock to the riverbed. Luckily, the current wasn’t particularly swift, and the river itself wasn’t very wide, so I just kept walking until my head popped back up out of the water. As it did, I heard the girl clearly for the first time.
“Amatu. Amatu singai.” I had no idea what that meant, but it triggered a system notification.
Something popped in my ears, like when you descend from too high an elevation too quickly and suddenly I understood what Juniper the Eidolon was saying: “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”
I reached the edge of the riverbank and stepped up onto the grass. I watched as her eyes went from mine, down the entire length of my body. I didn’t think a ghost could blush, but Juniper taught me that some things are just universal, even if you’re dead. I laughed to myself and started to put my pants on as her on/off flashing reached a fever pitch.
“I’m sorry! I didn’t know! I didn’t think anyone could see me!”
“Well, that’s hardly an excuse to go around spying on naked strangers, is it?”
She blinked, and the flashing stopped. Her eyes came up slowly to meet mine once more. She was quite pretty, beneath that bonnet – or I thought so, at least. It was hard to tell since she was a good 10 feet away or more and still trying to hide herself behind that bush.
“I…didn’t mean to spy on you. I just…it’s just that you’re the first person I have seen around here in centuries. I was curious,” Juniper said, her eyes tilting downward again.
“Plus, I was naked,” I said, zipping my pants. The zipping sound snapped her out of whatever thoughts she was having, and she blushed again. Harder, this time.
“That’s not—that has nothing to do with it!”
“Uh-huh, whatever you say, lady. Look, I’m, uh,” I stammered, trying to figure out how much to divulge to this little pervert, “well, I’m new around here. And apparently, I own a pretty sizeable section of this prairie. Maybe even all of it.”
She just stared at me. Apparently, this world doesn’t have trespassing laws.
“So, what? Do you just wander around the prairie day in and day out, or…?”
“Yes, so?” she said, jutting her jaw out at me slightly defensively as she stepped out from behind the bush. She folded her arms across her chest and raised an eyebrow at me.
“And you’ve been doing that for centuries? That’s a little sad, actually. Are you all alone out here?”
“Oh, goodness no. There are tons of people here. It’s just that none of them are alive. I guess I probably should have led with that. You’re the first living person I’ve seen in centuries. I have plenty of friends in the plains.”
That was a little disturbing to think about. Here I was, sleeping out in the open at night, apparently surrounded by ghosts the whole time. But then, The System consistently called this my “safezone.” It was in all the tooltips, all the system notifications, and even in the UI screens when I used Environmental Mapping. So, theoretically, the ghosts – or Eidolon, as appeared to be their preferred nomenclature – who live here must be friendly or at the very least, non-aggressive. That eased my mind a little bit. Not that I entirely trusted The System to give it to me straight, but it hadn’t really given me any false information up to this point, so I didn’t really have a reason to doubt it yet either.
“OK,” I said, “so…living people don’t travel through here, at all, then?”
She shook her head, solemnly.
“The living are all too afraid of us to come anywhere near this place. Well, all except you, apparently. Why are you so unbothered?”
“Lady,” I laughed, “yesterday I spoke with an actual god and had to fight a giant hamster. You don’t even rank in the top five weirdest interactions I’ve had this week.”
I thought about adding besides, I’m technically dead, too but I figured that would be a bit insensitive since I had been reincarnated into a corporeal form while she was wandering around looking like she was made out of mist. I also decided against telling her about my real suspicion that the river didn’t just give you an Intelligence buff, but also some sort of hidden relaxation buff.
She frowned slightly, looking at me with the face of someone playing “two truths and a lie.” I decided to change the subject.
“Well, I suppose I should finish washing my clothes before I head out for some weapons training. Maybe I’ll see you around again, sometime?”
“You…want to see me again?”
“Sure!” I said, “I mean, if you’d like that, of course. I kind of live here, now, which makes us neighbors. So, there’s no reason for us to not be on friendly terms, right?”
She blushed and wrung her hands nervously.
“I suppose not. No reason for us to be unfriendly, I mean. Not that I didn’t want to see you again.”
I smiled.
“Great! Until next time, then!”
“Wait!” she called out as I walked back across the river. “You never told me your name!”
“It’s Rocky,” I said over my shoulder.
“My name is Juniper!” she shouted.
“I know. Catch you later, Juniper!” I waved with one hand, without looking back. It was finally time to get my clothes cleaned up and get to work grinding levels.
“Bitch!” I shouted, having emptied an entire magazine without landing a single shot. I’d set the Burrow Tyrant teeth up on a fallen tree to act as targets. The System’s description had said the teeth were exceptionally durable, so I figured they could probably take more than a few shots from a low-level starter weapon. The problem was, I couldn’t test the theory because I couldn’t hit the goddamn things.
I grumbled in irritation as I reloaded the magazine. Nothing specific, mind you, just random cursing and editorializing about how I was the only American who couldn’t shoot a gun properly. A cogent thought actually did occur to me as I was popping bullets into the magazine, though: all this reloading was going to get me killed, someday. I wished I had a way to reach out to either The System or Seredh, directly. I needed spare magazines in the worst way, if I was going to survive fights with anything smarter and faster than the Burrow Tyrant.
Oh well, I thought. At least I have infinite ammo to balance it out. It was, in fact, my only saving grace. I could fire as many times as I needed over and over until I hit my target. The little infinity symbol next to my ammo count was a constant source of comfort. Still, all that reloading was really killing my thumbs. I guess the only option for now is to just take the advice of every ten-year-old on Earth and get good so I don’t get carpal tunnel from reloading every five seconds.
I finished loading the magazine and slid it into place. I held the freshly loaded weapon up in both hands, trying my best to remember the random bits of firearm information I’d picked up over the years – not from ever actually going to a firing range or actually handling a gun, but from being a terminally online goober who watched too many videos about topics I never really expected to need to know about. About all I could remember was to hold the gun with my dominant hand, use my off-hand as a stabilizing brace against the kick, and to keep both eyes open as I lined up my sights. I suddenly remembered a quote from Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man: “Don’t yank, don’t pull. Squeeze.” Had to be worth a try, right? So, I lined up my shot and squeezed the trigger slowly.
BLAM!
I missed. I tried again. I began to question whether I knew the difference between squeezing and pulling. Maybe it wasn’t the trigger issue that was throwing me off, though. Maybe the sights were off. Maybe I wasn’t lining them up correctly. Maybe I wasn’t judging the distance and accounting for it properly. I shook my head. There were too many maybes. How in the hell was I supposed to teach myself how to do something, when I didn’t know how to do the thing that I was trying to teach myself in the first place?
I adjusted my aim, lining up the two dots on the rear sight with the single dot on the front sight. I lifted the gun slightly upward to account for the distance between me and the target, took in a slow breath, released it, and fired again. This time the loud blast of the gun was followed by the exact sound that ricocheting bullets made in the westerns back on Earth.
Huh, I thought, I kind of thought they just made that sound up for the movies. Didn’t realize it was a real thing.
No sooner had the thought occurred to me than a strangled shout of pain came from the tree line behind my targets. A rough thrashing of leaves and branches followed, and a giant green humanoid creature burst out from the forest. His head snapped around from side to side and his eyes soon locked on mine. I immediately used Threat Assessment:
The orc snorted and roared at me. Then, he started stomping his way towards me. All I could do was stare at him. I didn’t know what to do. So I just uttered a single syllable that perfectly summed up the latest predicament I’d gotten myself into:
“Fuck.”