He could definitely use the practice.
Often he stopped too short, leaving some purple left in the tank.
“No, you have to push right to the last possible moment and then let up.”
A couple times he learned what it was like when he ran out of stamina. I filled him in on the first time it had happened to me. But after a while, he seemed to get the hang of it.
“Have you noticed we can run at exactly the same speed, for exactly the same amount of time?” I asked him as we wound around a small offshoot path and hit the larger “main” path again. The system clearly wanted people to go a certain way, which was great. Hopefully, Kym had also gone this way. I had nothing but hope right now, and I was clinging to it.
“Where—” Tyler stopped as I turned right. “Where are you going?”
I lifted my eyebrows, pointing. “That way?”
“Why?”
I slowly moved my pointing finger in the other direction. “That way?”
Confusion stole over his expression. “I can’t tell if you’re joking.”
“It’s right, right? We go right? Because when we saw the offshoot path, I specifically remember thinking we were going left.”
I specifically remembered that because I didn’t want to embarrass myself and go the wrong way. I was probably less than ten years his senior, but I was still older, and I really should be wiser. Or at least not such a complete dolt that I couldn’t remember such simple directions.
I swung my hand back to the right.
He squeezed his eyes shut and aggressively shook his head. “It is right, yes. We went right at the offshoot path, which wound around and came back to the main path, which means we go right here because we’re continuing north.”
My eyebrows slowly climbed upward. “So…” I pushed my pointing finger out a little farther. “Right…”
His eyes looked a little crazed. “Seriously, is this a joke? I’m not trying to poke holes in your ego or anything, but this is messing with my head.” He shoved his hand in the other direction. “North. That way.”
“Ah.” I nodded like I should’ve known all along. Because I should’ve. “That way. Got it.” Then, because I wasn’t going to be able to hide this little peccadillo of mine, I came clean about my left and right issue.
“I thought you were just messing with me,” he murmured. He reached over and pointed at the air in front of me. “You can enable the compass rose in your HUD.”
“My…HUD. My screen?”
“A HUD is…like, the overlay in your field of vision. The menu, your health, stats, controls—all that stuff—they’re in your head and you see it through your eyes.”
“Right. The screen.” I pulled it up and looked for the directions thingy.
“I see now,” he murmured.
“What?”
“Everyone is going to bring a different skill set to this place. We can’t start out equal in all things because we all have different knowledge we bring in, knowledge that would be nearly impossible to program because some of it is probably biological or intuition. You know how to whack things with bats and high kicks and have an all-around terrifyingly violent personality that would never transfer over to me. And I know how to work with this near-total immersion system. I thrive on strategy. You’re the muscle; I’m the stats guy. I also know my lefts and rights, which I didn’t realize was an actual skill until five minutes ago.”
“Sure, yeah, rub it in.”
He spat out a laugh, veering closer. “You need to make your screen sharable, and then I’ll show you how to enable the compass.”
I flared my hands. “Awesome. How do I do that?” I said in frustration.
“Okay, killer, calm down. I’m not the enemy.”
He was at the moment. Forget my being wiser; I was now hoping not to drool when he spoke about computer stuff.
He walked me through my screen and pointed out various settings.
“There isn’t an actual left and right setting,” he said, tapping so fast that I lost track of what he was doing. He didn’t seem to be making fun of me. “But we can talk in directions.” He whistled. “You’ve been busy.”
He tapped through my tabs and scrolled my pantry. In the meals section, his scroll was slower.
“Didn’t you get the book about crafting meals?” he asked, clicking a feature that showed the “recipe.” Most of them were just “apple x2.”
“Yeah, but I only have three globs—”
“Globs?”
I pointed at the health area.
“Hearts?” he asked.
“Sure.”
He pulled away a little so he could look at my face. His cheeks reddened and he went back to looking at my screen. Was he embarrassed for me?
“Those are hearts,” he explained. “Like…a human heart. The one in your body?”
“Ew.” I looked closer, squinting at the small picture. Sure enough, the shape was right, and there was a hint of the tubing or whatever sticking out the top. “Yuck. I wish you hadn’t told me that.”
“Not into anatomy?”
“Only the surface level, masculine, very shallow kind.” He pulled away, and I wiped out of the screen. “I didn’t bother looking up recipes, since I only have three globs and a bunch of insects in my pantry. Cooked apples will be fine until I find other stuff. I have a lot of apples. And acorns.”
“Noted.”
On our next path detour, which I insisted we take in case there might be some new items to collect, we saw a couple more monsters. Tyler got to practice attacking, and I felt bad because he got raked with claws when he didn’t dodge the returned strike in time, freezing instead of moving when the monster lunged at him.
“How are you possibly so good at keeping your cool when something attacks you?” he asked, mystified. “Have your reflexes always been superhuman?”
“I am very athletic, so yes, I do have good reflexes, but knowing what to do when someone lunges at you, or jumps out at you, or is sprinting at you with a stick, is learned behavior. My brothers still jump out at me. And when I instinctively try to punch them for it, they instinctively punch back, and then we’re boxing, which turns into wrestling because they’re not supposed to hit a girl when my dad is looking—it’s a whole thing. I’m thirty; they are between two and seven years older and still they act like kids when we get together. I can’t wear big hoops in case they put me in a headlock.”
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He shook his head slowly, picking at the dried blood on his arm. “It would be nice if the healing meals and potions erased the blood like respawning does.”
I shrugged, not worrying about it once the actual wounds were cured.
We hit the main path again and I paused, looking at the compass. I pointed questioningly.
“North,” he said patiently.
“Right, right. North. I remember you said that last time.” I turned in the opposite direction I had pointed. “We don’t bleed much. I don’t think we’d bleed out in here. It’s just damage.”
“Seems like it. I’ve been trying to figure out how they suppressed our natural bodily mechanics. This seems to be a constructed world, of some kind, with a full neural link. Like…” He tapped his temple and then gestured around us. “The interface is baked into our brains. Total immersion, with a side of pop-up menus. Does that make sense?”
No. “Yep.” I nodded for emphasis. I didn’t want it explained further.
“Are we even here?” he asked. “Are our bodies actually here, or are they in stasis somewhere and only our minds exist in this space? Have they separated our id from its shell?”
I held up my hand, squinting my eyes painfully. “Please stop talking. This is going to give me a headache. Just let me know when you work it out. Or, actually, don’t. All I want to know is how to get out of here. What is the goal? What is the point?”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I’m not sure what the overall point is yet, but right now it’s pretty clear the Learning Phase is trying to teach us the mechanics of this place. It’s making us figure out our world one step at a time. We have to develop skills to level up, and it’s showing us what failure means.”
“What failure means?”
“Yeah, like when we receive too much damage. Right now, we faint and then respawn—come back to life. We feel the pain, experience the effects, but get another chance to learn. After the Learning Phase…we might not get that second chance.”
Shivers washed over my body. After this phase, we might not come back at all. Lights out.
I took a deep breath. “Then we better go completely wild while we have the chance.”
The only problem was, right now, we didn’t have the resources. The monsters all stayed at the same level, only occasionally more than one in a cluster.
Tyler reckoned this area was “exploratory,” letting us focus on “game” interaction rather than survival. When asked why the beginning of this phase had a three-monster grouping and not this far along the path, he didn’t know. His thoughtful silence meant he was working on it.
Me Tarzan, him Smart Guy. I was glad I’d found him.
He still seemed wary.
After the third detour path, we emerged onto the main “road” to find a youngish guy about Tyler’s age. He was walking with his bat held in a white-knuckled grip, his eyes scanning. He stopped abruptly when he saw us. He shifted and moved his other hand toward the bat, movements slow but intent plain.
“Whoa, buddy.” I stepped forward, drawing my sword from over my shoulder. “What’s the deal? Why the violence?”
His other hand curled around the handle, his grip telling, his body shift more so. He knew how to handle that thing. He planned on using it.
No sandals adorned his feet. No dried blood speckled his skin. Mistrust shone in his wary eyes.
“We’re not trying to hurt you, bro.” I put my sword away, though it wasn’t for the reason this guy probably thought. I put out my hands like I was surrendering, the action also not as it seemed. “We’re not the enemy here. We’re just trying to learn stuff and figure out our way. We’re better off working together than independently, don’t you think?”
“I think the people in here can’t be trusted,” he spat, his gaze flicking to Tyler and then back to me again. “You think I want to lose all my stuff a second time?”
“I don’t know how you lost all your stuff a first time. I—”
He ran forward, pulling his bat all the way back like he planned on hitting a baseball with all his strength.
Way wrong move to land that hit, bro. It gave the potential victim a ton of time to tackle you while you were executing the backswing.
To teach this kid a very valuable lesson, I sprinted at him, my arms out. His eyes widened as I neared. He didn’t step diagonally forward as he should’ve, instead backpedaling in choppy movements.
Wrong move number two. This guy had never played “street gang” with the neighborhood kids, and it showed.
I barreled into him, shorter and thinner but not weaker. I was a wiry little sucker, as I’d always heard. He flexed, trying to keep me from taking him down. My momentum moved him backward. I hugged his arms and body tightly, keeping that bat put, got a stabilizing foot down, and ripped my weight to the side, yanking with my arms at the same time.
Without a proper foothold or balance, he couldn’t counteract the force of my movements. He rolled over my hip. I let go, and he splatted onto the ground. I didn’t follow him down—what was I, crazy? He might be a better wrestler than I was. I danced over him, cautious of any number of things I’d do if I were in his situation, like kicking for my legs, swinging for me while on the ground, or scrambling to grab and pull me down.
Seeing him flail, I stomped on his hand. He screamed, and I kicked away the bat.
“Like I said, I’m not trying to hurt you!” I yelled, bringing out my sword again. I left the bat where it was. If I picked it up, it would probably go into inventory, and he’d think I was stealing it. “Let’s talk rationally about this.”
He curled up into a ball around his (slightly) injured hand, looking up at me with fear-soaked eyes.
I backed up, my hands out in surrender again, only this time I meant it. He really should be able to tell the difference. It was all in the eyes.
“It doesn’t hurt that bad,” I told him, an echo of Granddad. “Walk it off.” Then, as a joke, I finished with, “If you want to cry, I’ll give you something to cry about.” I flared my eyebrows. “Remember that one—”
With a whimper, the guy scrambled up and took off running into the trees.
“Wait!” I jogged after him. It reminded me of that lady who threw her sword at me. “Well, here. At least take your bat.” I stowed my sword, grabbed his bat, and was surprised when it didn’t go into my inventory. I hurled it at the trees after him. “You’re going to need that.”
I watched the trees. The guy didn’t come back to grab the bat.
“Well…” I pulled my lips to the side. “Maybe if we leave, he’ll feel comfortable enough to come out and get it.”
“I doubt he’ll ever feel comfortable in this place again,” Tyler told me, his eyes tightened in unease.
“Bro.” I headed back in his direction. “He was getting ready to swing at me. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t even have a weapon for that part!”
“When you were talking about swinging bats and being hit with them or saying you could tell when you were about to get thumped, or whatever you said, I really didn’t appreciate the full gravity of the situation.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a hard lesson.”
“Which that guy just learned. You’re like Mortal Kombat in the flesh.” Despite his wary eyes, he had a crooked grin. “I think I’d really like to see you interact with your brothers.” He held up his hands as we started walking. “With you in the Thunderdome and me safely in the stands. I do not want to participate, just to make that clear.”
“Don’t try to hit me with a bat and you won’t have to participate. What did he mean that people took his stuff? When you were working on my screen, I didn’t see an option for you to grab stuff out.”
“He was probably looted.”
“Like…robbed?”
He started talking slower, what he now did when trying to explain stuff to me. I would’ve been annoyed if it hadn’t been necessary.
“When you kill an NPC, the item that pops up is the loot, right? You kill the thing, and then you loot it. You take its stuff. What you get is an element to help you in the game, rather than its…shirt or bow tie or whatever.”
“Someone killed that guy?” I asked, aghast. I looked back. The bat was still there.
“Sounds like it. I mean, we respawn. The attacker probably knew that. They did the damage, grabbed his stuff, and he respawned. Now he has to grab more stuff.” He looked around in thought. “Maybe that’s why there’s this big stretch of world with limited monsters. We’re now being required to figure out how to deal with each other within the game.”
“Stop calling it a game. It is not a game,” I said vehemently. “This might turn into a life-or-death situation after teaching people it is okay to kill others and take their stuff. Why do any of the work if we can just take it from each other?”
“Because a world based on progression mechanics means you only get stronger by doing the work yourself. Stealing is a shortcut at this level, but it won’t carry you long term. Even if they continually steal stuff from more advanced play—people, they won’t have the skills and know-how to confront the harder NPCs. Stealing isn’t helping them. It’s hurting them.”
I ground my teeth. “Maybe so, but until they learn that, they will keep cutting people down. They’ll keep killing, and eventually, their victim might not wake up.”
He nodded slowly. “Now we know. Thankfully, you know how to swing a bat.”
Sure, but would I be any good against a knife? Or a bazooka? There was no telling what sorts of weapons this place had in store for us. Not to mention, I had limits. I was wiry and athletic, yes, but against a bigger person with more skill, I’d be the one getting looted.
“Walk faster,” I said with a rush of adrenaline. “It’s imperative that we level up faster than anyone else. We need to get the best weapons first. That’ll give us an edge and prevent us from being the stepping stones to teach these buggers that looters never prosper.”
“If you had pillows with sayings like that…you’d go broke.”
“But at least then I’d have a ton of pillows to smoother you with. Come on, sprint-walk-sprint, ready?”
Did you realize the globs were hearts?
