I woke up the next day, having slept in to about midmorning. The hike home had eaten up a significant amount of the night, and the sun was already teasing a rise when I fell into my tent. I sent Jasmine a quick message that I had arrived safely, then proceeded to promptly pass out into a deep, comatose slumber. So, I supposed it was only natural to sleep in a bit – but I was still a little annoyed about it.
On the walk home I had thought long and hard about what I wanted my future to be, here in this new world. It wasn’t long into that thought process that I realized that, if I wanted to have a future at all, I needed to get serious about leveling up and increasing my odds of survival. With that goal in mind, I drew up a mental plan. For the next few days, I’d spend the majority of my time training with my handgun. Between the gun and the dagger, the former seemed like it would probably be much easier to teach myself to use than the latter would be. I didn’t know if having an actual workout routine would help build Strength and Agility, but I figured it couldn’t hurt, so I also planned to do a few hours of that each day.
But the very first thing that I needed to do, before anything else…was bathe. I was pungent beyond all belief and I didn’t know if it was the pheromones I’d used, or just the lack of deodorant in this world, or some mixture of both. Whatever the case, the first order of business was clearly to take a dip in the river. So, that’s exactly what I did.
As I approached the riverbank, I took a look at my mini map and I could see Juniper the Eidolon headed my way. I took my shirt off and knelt down next to the water to give it a quick scrubbing. I kept an eye on my map, tracking the ancient spirit until I felt like she was within earshot.
“Come to watch me take another bath, have you?” I asked, raising my voice over the sound of the river’s current.
The little gray dot on my mini map froze and blinked out. Then it popped up again in the exact same spot. I laughed and stood up, wringing out my soaked shirt.
“That didn’t work last time, and it doesn’t appear you’ve been practicing much from the look of things. Why don’t you just come over here and chat with me for a while instead of being a creep about it?”
There was a rustling of the bushes across the river, and she stepped out into view. Her arms were folded across her chest as she floated over the river and landed next to me.
“Take it back.”
“What?”
“I am not a Creep. Take it back.”
“If you’re not a creep, why do you keep creeping around like you do?”
“I’m a ghost, Rocky. It’s in my nature. But I’m not a Creep. Those things are vile creatures. You take back what you said.”
I blinked. Apparently, a Creep was a type of creature whose existence I was previously unaware of. Beyond that, Eidolon apparently found the comparison to Creeps to be highly offensive, for some reason. I filed that information away and apologized.
“I’m sorry, Juniper. I didn’t realize Creeps are an actual race, here. Where I’m from it’s just a figure of speech. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
Her posture softened and she let down her guard a bit at that.
“Well, ok. Just…don’t do it again.”
I smiled at her and nodded.
“You have my solemn oath, milady,” I half-joked, then paused. “So, hey, I don’t mind if you hang around while I do this, but could you at least look the other way until I’m in the water?”
She blushed and flickered in and out of existence, which I was starting to suspect was her natural response to embarrassment. But, she nodded and turned her back to me, giving me a bit of privacy as I fully undressed.
“You were gone all day, yesterday. Were you training the whole time?”
“Nah,” I said as I slid into the river. “I did a couple hours of training in the morning, but some stuff happened and I got totally sidetracked. I actually ended up sneaking into the orc stronghold just past the southern forest.”
“Rocky, that’s dangerous. You shouldn’t go there,” she said, a note of concern creeping into her voice.
“Yeah, a couple of orcs told me the same sort of thing, actually. Everything turned out ok, though, so no harm done, I guess. You can turn around now, by the way.”
I had my back up against the river’s edge and had just clicked in affirmation of my desire to bathe on the river’s associated system alert. I immediately felt the tingle of whatever the “bathe” effect was. It still stumped me, to be honest. Just being in the water and scouring yourself did nothing out of the ordinary, but as soon as you click on that bathe button it was like someone dumped a box of Scrubbing Bubbles on top of you and the grime just slid right off. This was only the second time I’d used it, so the novelty hadn’t yet worn off – and I hoped it never did. The feeling was amazing.
Juniper glanced at me, looked away, then did her best to try to keep from peeking. I could tell she didn’t entirely win that battle, though. I caught her looking now and then as we continued to talk. I washed my jeans, my button up, as well as my undergarments, but I left the fleece off to the side. I hadn’t really done much to dirty it up, so I figured I would use it to cover up with once I got out of the river while both I and the rest of my clothes air dried.
As I laid on the grass, soaking up the midday sun with the fleece loosely draped over my midsection, Juniper and I continued to chat. It turns out, The System was actually right about her. She really did seem like a sweet girl. A little perverted and voyeuristic, maybe, but nobody’s perfect, right? I rolled over onto my side and looked up at her. She was sitting next to me with her arms around her knees.
“So, you’ve really been out here just wandering the wilderness for three full centuries?” I asked, incredulously. “That’s crazy. What do you guys do out here to keep from going insane?”
“Honestly? We do a lot of tending to the wildlife and flowers. Did you know that sometimes the bees need help pollinating? It’s a lot of work, trying to keep the entire zone filled and vibrant. They’re good little farmers, though. I like them. They travel a lot, so they always bring me new stories from beyond the Plains. The birds, too. Though the birds and the bees don’t really get along as well as the old adage would have you believe.”
“Huh,” I said. “You guys have that saying here, too? About the birds and the bees?”
“Oh, yes. Mama said to me once-”
“Wait. Hold up,” I interrupted. “I’m sorry, go back. Did you say the bees told you stories??”
“Of course. Eidolon can talk to pretty much any species on the planet. I think it has to do with us being dead, maybe? We don’t exactly have eardrums to hear with, so we pick up on the meaning behind the words, rather than the words, themselves. Even right now, I’m not really talking aloud…you’re just interpreting it that way because you’re alive and that’s how live people talk.”
I laid back down and put my arms behind my head, watching the clouds. That was a lot of information to digest. It brought up all sorts of implications I didn’t feel particularly ready to contemplate, nor qualified to speculate upon. We remained there like that for a while – me relaxing in the sun considering the weirdness of my new home and friend; her sitting there with her knees to her chest, allowing the silence to exist uninterrupted.
Eventually, I’d felt that I’d dried off enough to get dressed, so I stood up with the fleece still wrapped around my waist and pulled the rest of my nearly-dry clothes from the tree branch I’d hung them on to dry. This time, Juniper turned her back to me without me even requesting it. Though she did take a glance over her shoulder once or twice as we continued our chat.
“It’s pretty cool that you can talk to animals and insects and what not. That definitely has to help with the boredom, I imagine.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I guess. After a century or so, the stories kind of start to repeat in fairly predictable patterns, though. The clover is really good here, the violets are better over there, the apple blossoms are coming in too slowly this year. There’s only so much insectoid horticulture a girl can take, you know?”
I nodded.
“Sounds like you could use a new – ouch!” I yanked my hand up to my face and jammed my index finger into my mouth. “Dammit.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I just get hangnails, sometimes. I snagged my pants as I was trying to button them,” I replied, doing my best to speak around the finger lodged between my lips.
“Here, let me see.”
She turned and stepped toward me. I wiped my saliva-slicked finger on my pants and held it out to her. After a brief inspection she nodded and her silver Eidolon eyes met mine.
“You know, I bet Moira could help with this.”
“Moira?”
“Mhm. She was an apothecary and stylist for the local barony back in her day. She would need something to do the work with, though. We don’t exactly have a lot of personal belongings here in the Plains.”
I thought for a moment, and a potential solution occurred to me. I smiled and finished buttoning my pants.
“Can you take me to Moira? I’d like to get some training in today, but I feel like this hangnail could really throw off my concentration if I don’t get it fixed, first.”
“I don’t see why not,” she said with a shrug. “She usually stays somewhere between here and the foothills. It shouldn’t be too hard to track her down.”
“Great! Let’s head that way and maybe – oh! Sorry, give me just a second, I’ve got a message incoming.”
I woke up the next day, having slept in to about midmorning. The hike home had eaten up a significant amount of the night, and the sun was already teasing a rise when I fell into my tent. I sent Jasmine a quick message that I had arrived safely, then proceeded to promptly pass out into a deep, comatose slumber. So, I supposed it was only natural to sleep in a bit – but I was still a little annoyed about it.
On the walk home I had thought long and hard about what I wanted my future to be, here in this new world. It wasn’t long into that thought process that I realized that, if I wanted to have a future at all, I needed to get serious about leveling up and increasing my odds of survival. With that goal in mind, I drew up a mental plan. For the next few days, I’d spend the majority of my time training with my handgun. Between the gun and the dagger, the former seemed like it would probably be much easier to teach myself to use than the latter would be. I didn’t know if having an actual workout routine would help build Strength and Agility, but I figured it couldn’t hurt, so I also planned to do a few hours of that each day.
But the very first thing that I needed to do, before anything else…was bathe. I was pungent beyond all belief and I didn’t know if it was the pheromones I’d used, or just the lack of deodorant in this world, or some mixture of both. Whatever the case, the first order of business was clearly to take a dip in the river. So, that’s exactly what I did.
As I approached the riverbank, I took a look at my mini map and I could see Juniper the Eidolon headed my way. I took my shirt off and knelt down next to the water to give it a quick scrubbing. I kept an eye on my map, tracking the ancient spirit until I felt like she was within earshot.
“Come to watch me take another bath, have you?” I asked, raising my voice over the sound of the river’s current.
The little gray dot on my mini map froze and blinked out. Then it popped up again in the exact same spot. I laughed and stood up, wringing out my soaked shirt.
“That didn’t work last time, and it doesn’t appear you’ve been practicing much from the look of things. Why don’t you just come over here and chat with me for a while instead of being a creep about it?”
There was a rustling of the bushes across the river, and she stepped out into view. Her arms were folded across her chest as she floated over the river and landed next to me.
“Take it back.”
“What?”
“I am not a Creep. Take it back.”
“If you’re not a creep, why do you keep creeping around like you do?”
“I’m a ghost, Rocky. It’s in my nature. But I’m not a Creep. Those things are vile creatures. You take back what you said.”
I blinked. Apparently, a Creep was a type of creature whose existence I was previously unaware of. Beyond that, Eidolon apparently found the comparison to Creeps to be highly offensive, for some reason. I filed that information away and apologized.
“I’m sorry, Juniper. I didn’t realize Creeps are an actual race, here. Where I’m from it’s just a figure of speech. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
Her posture softened and she let down her guard a bit at that.
“Well, ok. Just…don’t do it again.”
I smiled at her and nodded.
“You have my solemn oath, milady,” I half-joked, then paused. “So, hey, I don’t mind if you hang around while I do this, but could you at least look the other way until I’m in the water?”
She blushed and flickered in and out of existence, which I was starting to suspect was her natural response to embarrassment. But, she nodded and turned her back to me, giving me a bit of privacy as I fully undressed.
“You were gone all day, yesterday. Were you training the whole time?”
“Nah,” I said as I slid into the river. “I did a couple hours of training in the morning, but some stuff happened and I got totally sidetracked. I actually ended up sneaking into the orc stronghold just past the southern forest.”
“Rocky, that’s dangerous. You shouldn’t go there,” she said, a note of concern creeping into her voice.
“Yeah, a couple of orcs told me the same sort of thing, actually. Everything turned out ok, though, so no harm done, I guess. You can turn around now, by the way.”
I had my back up against the river’s edge and had just clicked in affirmation of my desire to bathe on the river’s associated system alert. I immediately felt the tingle of whatever the “bathe” effect was. It still stumped me, to be honest. Just being in the water and scouring yourself did nothing out of the ordinary, but as soon as you click on that bathe button it was like someone dumped a box of Scrubbing Bubbles on top of you and the grime just slid right off. This was only the second time I’d used it, so the novelty hadn’t yet worn off – and I hoped it never did. The feeling was amazing.
Juniper glanced at me, looked away, then did her best to try to keep from peeking. I could tell she didn’t entirely win that battle, though. I caught her looking now and then as we continued to talk. I washed my jeans, my button up, as well as my undergarments, but I left the fleece off to the side. I hadn’t really done much to dirty it up, so I figured I would use it to cover up with once I got out of the river while both I and the rest of my clothes air dried.
As I laid on the grass, soaking up the midday sun with the fleece loosely draped over my midsection, Juniper and I continued to chat. It turns out, The System was actually right about her. She really did seem like a sweet girl. A little perverted and voyeuristic, maybe, but nobody’s perfect, right? I rolled over onto my side and looked up at her. She was sitting next to me with her arms around her knees.
“So, you’ve really been out here just wandering the wilderness for three full centuries?” I asked, incredulously. “That’s crazy. What do you guys do out here to keep from going insane?”
“Honestly? We do a lot of tending to the wildlife and flowers. Did you know that sometimes the bees need help pollinating? It’s a lot of work, trying to keep the entire zone filled and vibrant. They’re good little farmers, though. I like them. They travel a lot, so they always bring me new stories from beyond the Plains. The birds, too. Though the birds and the bees don’t really get along as well as the old adage would have you believe.”
“Huh,” I said. “You guys have that saying here, too? About the birds and the bees?”
“Oh, yes. Mama said to me once-”
“Wait. Hold up,” I interrupted. “I’m sorry, go back. Did you say the bees told you stories??”
“Of course. Eidolon can talk to pretty much any species on the planet. I think it has to do with us being dead, maybe? We don’t exactly have eardrums to hear with, so we pick up on the meaning behind the words, rather than the words, themselves. Even right now, I’m not really talking aloud…you’re just interpreting it that way because you’re alive and that’s how live people talk.”
I laid back down and put my arms behind my head, watching the clouds. That was a lot of information to digest. It brought up all sorts of implications I didn’t feel particularly ready to contemplate, nor qualified to speculate upon. We remained there like that for a while – me relaxing in the sun considering the weirdness of my new home and friend; her sitting there with her knees to her chest, allowing the silence to exist uninterrupted.
Eventually, I’d felt that I’d dried off enough to get dressed, so I stood up with the fleece still wrapped around my waist and pulled the rest of my nearly-dry clothes from the tree branch I’d hung them on to dry. This time, Juniper turned her back to me without me even requesting it. Though she did take a glance over her shoulder once or twice as we continued our chat.
“It’s pretty cool that you can talk to animals and insects and what not. That definitely has to help with the boredom, I imagine.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I guess. After a century or so, the stories kind of start to repeat in fairly predictable patterns, though. The clover is really good here, the violets are better over there, the apple blossoms are coming in too slowly this year. There’s only so much insectoid horticulture a girl can take, you know?”
I nodded.
“Sounds like you could use a new – ouch!” I yanked my hand up to my face and jammed my index finger into my mouth. “Dammit.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I just get hangnails, sometimes. I snagged my pants as I was trying to button them,” I replied, doing my best to speak around the finger lodged between my lips.
“Here, let me see.”
She turned and stepped toward me. I wiped my saliva-slicked finger on my pants and held it out to her. After a brief inspection she nodded and her silver Eidolon eyes met mine.
“You know, I bet Moira could help with this.”
“Moira?”
“Mhm. She was an apothecary and stylist for the local barony back in her day. She would need something to do the work with, though. We don’t exactly have a lot of personal belongings here in the Plains.”
I thought for a moment, and a potential solution occurred to me. I smiled and finished buttoning my pants.
“Can you take me to Moira? I’d like to get some training in today, but I feel like this hangnail could really throw off my concentration if I don’t get it fixed, first.”
“I don’t see why not,” she said with a shrug. “She usually stays somewhere between here and the foothills. It shouldn’t be too hard to track her down.”
“Great! Let’s head that way and maybe – oh! Sorry, give me just a second, I’ve got a message incoming.”
Later that afternoon, having pleaded my way into Moira giving me the full manicure, I headed over to my impromptu training ground. Under no circumstances was I going to risk a repeat of the Vrk’shryk incident, so I’d set up my targets in an open field within my safezone. I spent the next five hours there, firing my gun at the Burrow Tyrant teeth until the crook of my thumb was raw from the recoil. By the time I’d finished, my weapon had levelled up twice. It turned out that I was on the right track using the YouTube and movie techniques I remembered from back on Earth.
I decided to inspect my current inventory, to see how my situation was currently sitting. I had the gun, the Blade of Seredh, the Divine Pheromone Set, five Supreme Vials of Healing, four and a half crates worth of rations, and my Divine Prayer Beads. I decided that I was mostly looking pretty good, for my level. But the Prayer Beads appeared to have a new notification. I clicked on it to see what it was about.
I paused, befuddled by that last part. When had I used up a miracle prayer bead? Then it struck me. I had, without thinking, said a prayer to Seredh when I used the pheromones in Jasmine’s quarters. I prayed that my last ditch attempt to not die would work.
Fuck, I thought. I have got to start reading these descriptions as soon as I receive an item. The worst part of it was that the prayer was probably entirely unnecessary, given that the pheromones themselves came from Seredh. They almost had to work, being of divine origin – or so I assumed. I envisioned Seredh facepalming at the use of my first bead. If each one of these granted a miracle with a 100% guaranteed success rate, I needed to be extremely judicious in how I prayed, from here on out.
In what was perhaps a bout of self-flagellation, I decided to end my training by jogging around the entire perimeter of the Plains, stopping every 10 minutes or so to do 20 pushups. By the time I’d finished, I had done over 1,000 pushups, ran for what appeared to be about 5 miles as best I could tell, and developed an aroma that would make a water buffalo blush. It was clearly time for another bath, so I wandered over and settled into the river for a nice, relaxing cooldown. The sun was setting, I had hung out with a new friend without making too big an ass of myself, I got in some decent training, and best of all…no hangnails. A successful day, by any metric. A thought occurred to me randomly and I decided to message Jasmine, again.
