003

“Status! Reveal.” Jane pushed a blue box toward Erick as they walked. “This is mine.”

Erick repeated her words, then pushed his status her way.

After a moment, he declared, “I have one more willpower than you!”

Jane threw him a mocking look, then glanced down at their feet to scan their trail. She looked up at the sun then over at the nearest crystal splash, making a minute course correction. She ensured they were still on the correct path every ten minutes. Thanks to that, they probably were still on the right path.

She looked over his status again, then closed the window, saying, “Looks like trekking in the desert takes some constant HP. Let me know if you get low.” She looked at a nearby crystal plant, that was still forty feet away. Neither of them wanted to get anywhere near the probably-deadly flora. “I wonder if those make good tequila.”

Ah. Yeah. They did look like giant crystal agaves.

Erick closed Jane’s status window. “They’re probably poisoned.”

“Or full of spiders. Something has to live out here besides the plants.”

A breeze flowed across the land, setting the sparse crystal growths to tinkling. They had both decided a bit ago that, yes, the crystal agaves were definitely plants. Unless this world had flexible crystals, too. Which was a possibility considering what they’d seen so far. But still, flexible crystal was a long shot of an explanation. They were more likely disguised plants.

Erick almost took a sip from the canteen, but decided against it. That registrar had summoned the canteen with a shoulder strap, so it wasn’t that heavy of a weight to carry around. But it was starting to weigh on him. If the settlement was really two days away, they would need all the water they could get. Though the phrase ‘Hydrate or Die’ was very true, Erick didn’t really feel thirsty.

Jane said, “Good news: Looks like MP refreshes. I gained three back since we landed.”

“You’re taking this so seriously.”

“Because I know you won’t.”

Well that was true. When Erick encountered physical danger he usually laughed it off. He had the same reaction to ridiculous social constructs, like avoiding the gangs who lived in his town. He had been mugged twice because of that, but he had also helped several young gang members get back on their feet and out of their violent lives. For the last few years he had even attended the Quince Fiesta the gang threw every month. He waved to the dealers on the streets, and sometimes they waved back.

… He was going to miss them. Really some of the best beef empanadas in the world at that party.

“You know… There’s help for understanding the Script, if you want it. The command is Menu Help.”

Ah. She had misconstrued his silence. That’s okay, he’d roll with it. He was kinda mad at the blue boxes. Magic was supposed to be mystical! Not this video-gamey nonsense.

“I’m not doing that. This whole magic thing is stupid.”

“It’s crazy to not use the systems given to everyone. You’re no ascetic, Dad.”

“Okay. Well. That’s a different argument entirely, but tabling that for now— I’m not ‘Eight Strength’, or 160 max MP.”

“Your Status says otherwise.”

They walked in silence under the temperate sun. The walk wasn’t as bad as Erick thought it would be. It was dusty and dry, and sandy in a few places, for sure. But it wasn’t ‘desert hot’.

Oh.

He laughed.

“What?”

“No man-made climate change on Veird!”

Jane smiled. “That’s the spirit!” She thrust her huge knife forward, punching the sky. “No more big problems! Only survival!”

“To not dying of dehydration!”

“To cooking a rat over an open fire!”

“To walking away from a skydive!”

“To adventure!”

They laughed together, their voices floating away on the breeze as they walked toward the unknown.

– – – –

Hours passed. The sun was on its way to the horizon. Erick had already [Mend]ed the scrap of blanket twice, bringing it back into existence, and handed it over to Jane. She carried a few other things to be mended inside the thick cloth. The [Mend] on the book went less well. One[Mend] accomplished almost nothing. Books must be complicated objects.

Erick had no idea how far they had gone, though his HP had dipped below half three times. Jane topped him off when he asked, and one time when he didn’t, but they had driven through the night before they landed on Veird. HP did not seem to be a problem, but exhaustion was.

Jane said, “Fuck I’m tired!”

“Let’s stop.”

“Where!” Jane threw her hand wide. “There’s nothing but crystal agave for miles and miles!”

“We should sleep on the blanket while the sun is still up—”

Jane slapped her forehead. “Duh. Of course. Monsters might come out at night. We’ll need to be awake for that. Work out some shifts.”

That was not what Erick meant. “Fuck. You think so?”

“Well yeah. What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that I could sleep for 12 hours.”

“… Yeah. That too.” She looked around. She looked up. “This is as good a spot as any.” She stepped to the side of the path, then took out her knife and carved a deep groove into the ground, along the direction they were going, ending the carving in a large arrow “I’d love a compass but this is the best we have.”

“We’re both close to level 1. There might be more points and more survival skills.”

Jane nodded, then stepped away from the path. Erick followed her to a spot similar to all the rest; well away from the agave and in the middle of nowhere. She unwrapped the blanket from around her chest, then set it down, carefully extracting what they had managed to salvage from the crash. The gaming book. Erick’s phone remains. A fried car charger. A piece of a paper coffee cup. A shred of a diet coke bottle, all melted and twisted onto itself. A piece of the windshield. It was more trash than treasure, but it might be worth something in the future. Jane seemed to think that they could use something called a ‘scry’ on the windshield fragment to find the car, if they wanted to. The charger was to make charging the phones easier, if they could somehow manufacture the right electrical current. The cups were for additional water containers, if they found any sources of water out here. Jane was sure that the phones themselves could probably be linked together as communication devices, if maybe they had access to other magics. There were a lot of ‘if’s, but that’s how life was sometimes.

Jane plopped down on her half of the blanket, her face pointed outward. Erick took his position on the other half of the blanket, looking in the other direction. If there were monsters out there, they were well hidden. All Erick saw were tall crystal agaves and lots of flat dirt.

She asked, “What’s your HP at now?”

“22.”

“Fuck! Dad!”

“What? I’m fine.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Jane poked him in the side.

He sat up in time to see her sitting up and poking him with another glow on her fingers, for another 26 HP. Then again. He realized something was different after the third healing poke. He should have noticed right away, but damn was he tired.

“It’s healing twice now?”

“Yeah. [Rejuvenation] got to 2. One extra second of healing per level.”

“You leveled?”

“I did.” She laid back down. “I got two points and about a dozen different ideas of what I want to do with them, so I’m saving ‘em for now.”

Erick laid back down, too. There were no changes either locally or on the horizon.

“Is there a cleaning option in those menus?”

“It’s called Cleanse and I think I’m going to take it, but not right now. You’ve noticed that there has been no wildlife at all ever since we landed, right? Either this land is truly dead, or that Darkness marked us, somehow. Maybe a scent marker? Maybe something else.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. Like. I know we must smell like food because I don’t even want to talk about what kinda gore slipped out of my pants while we walked. But we really should have been attacked before this.”

“…Right.”

A moment passed.

He asked, “What’s your plan?”

“Teleporting paladin.”

Rolling with the idea, Erick said, “Don’t you have to pledge to a god, or…”

“Maybe. Maybe not. If there’s a god out there that embodies my ideals, I might pledge to them. If that’s how Veird works. I don’t know enough to make a call like that right now, but teleporting is obviously a real thing. We’ve been through at least one teleport, and I’m not sure what I would call our arrival on Veird, but that was sort of like a teleport. That purple dude for sure teleported.”

“That registrar was an asshole.”

“That didn’t bother me. This system, the Script? That’s what bothers me. It seems horribly unbalanced.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Not enough parameters, for one. There’s no way to express the complexities of a person with only four main stats. HP, MP, and the two regens are just direct numerical expressions of the four main stats.”

“Does your healing spell still cost 5 MP at level 2?”