I held my new to-do list in my hand as I walked outside.

Repair all damages caused by them

Strengthen the wall around the house and greenhouses

Buy a chicken

Upgrade brick tool

Make glass

Declutter pink room on second floor

It was short, but I also only had five days. Upgrading the brick fire would take at least 0/50 bricks, and that was if bricks were the only thing it needed. I needed to get started on those bricks now if I ever hoped to finish before they came.

I pulled short when I noticed the green house. Before I noticed that it had 0/5 glass that needed to be fixed. But now I saw 0/8 glass. It only took me a moment to realize what this meant. If I didn’t finish repairing the damages before they came, then the damages got worse somehow. I really needed to upgrade the brick fire to make glass.

I dove into the work. Tomorrow it would rain, and I already had a hope that the soups would keep me warm, like chilled tomato soup would keep me cool in a blisteringly hot day. I could do this.

I cut down a tree for some logs, cutting them into boards so I could stuff them in the dumpster to get me to 20.00 dopamine points. It was enough to buy one chicken. As soon as I bought it from the clipboard, I heard it clucking in the coop. I entered the coop and walked to the feeder. Much like Killie, I dropped feed that I magically had into the bucket and filled up its water. Killie watched the chicken, curious, but now she had an animal friend to play with.

At least… I hoped they would play together.

The first half of the day was getting twenty-five clumps of clay from the river shaped and baking in the sun. Would the boiling hot sun cook the brick squares faster? It was enough of a question that I slipped it away for experimentation. The next blisteringly hot day would be the day after they came.

Once the clay was baking in the sun, I got to work repairing the damage to the fence. I bought the third article of clothing for logging, and I was finally making six logs drop with every tree I brought down. My mind flittered briefly to that time the alien overlords let me buy three clothes at once before taking it away. It just came briefly, because I quickly put it out of my mind again. Because the other memory that popped up was them calmly deciding whether to delete that memory from my mind. I had a few experiences with those overlords since, and each time it unsettled me. Could I believe they were who they said they were? That they were a neutral party?

How could they possibly be neutral when they were setting this game up and placing me in the middle of it. Didn’t they bring me here? How could they be neutral when they sent me here?

Once again, the memory came back. Play the game, get answers.

“Sometimes it’s really hard to do this,” I muttered out loud. “It’s a little unsettling when you can read my thoughts and answer me in the game. I… don’t like it.”

There was no feeling or impression. I once again felt like I was speaking into the void. I noticed Killie in the grass, then watched as she pounced on a mouse.

“Huh. I guess she is learning to be a mouser,” I said.

At least that mouse wasn’t in a lab. I grumbled, but kept chopping wood for the fences.

It didn’t take me nearly as long to repair the damage to the fences. Since I had strengthened the fences, they didn’t completely obliterate them, so it was about 0/10 boards and 0/5 firewood for the main fence, then 0/3 boards and 0/1 firewood for the greenhouse fence. Doable. The fence itself was about waist high on me, and I watched as words and numbers shivered above the fence. 0/50 boards. Was this fence about to get higher?

It was going to rain tomorrow, and I didn’t dare leave the finished sunbaked clay to possibly get wet. Better safe than sorry, so I brought them inside to the storage room. The alien overlords must have realized it was the brick fire that was taking me so much time, because I could now stick ten clay bricks at a time and cook them for half a day. This was going to work. I could do this. Five days wasn’t a lot, but so far, I made an excellent start. I could get this brick tool upgraded in two and a half days if I kept feeding them the clay bricks.

Killie wasn’t nearly as jumpy tonight, and I got the feeling that on nights they came was nights she was freaking out over more malevolent spirits. I considered starting to clean upstairs in that pink room while I waited an hour to go to bed, but quickly squashed the idea. I was at fifty percent sanity. I didn’t want to go upstairs at night.

Instead, I wiped off the end table of the entertainment room and dusted the windowsills. Then I wiped off the card table of the living room and the computer desk before it was time to sleep.

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The bedroom didn’t fill with red light when I woke up in the morning. Instead, it was a couple degrees colder in the house, and it was dark. I opened my eyes and peeked out the broken blinds, hearing the thunderous sound of rain above me. It made me shiver, but I at least had all my sanity back.

I checked the clipboard to see if I had any leveling that I could buy clothes for, which… was a weird thought to have. What was this game doing to me?

Cleaning was the next section that was close, at level 12. Cooking was still the lowest, and I planned on doing some more tomorrow after this rain went away. It was really coming down.

I ate some warm soup from the storage room, pleased to see fifteen-minute timer there. I ran outside and quickly did my morning of watering the tomatoes and potatoes. With the greenhouses so damaged, it was taking longer for them to grow. I really needed to upgrade that brick tool. It wasn’t until I was halfway done with the gardening that I realized the soup also gave stamina, but since I was already at full stamina, it didn’t give me anything. I tried not to feel guilty about the wasted stamina.

Instead, in the fifteen minutes I had, I did my gardening, then shoved ten bricks into the brick tool. The timer was longer. Since it was so cold today, it would take all day for these bricks to be finished. I allowed myself a moment to be disappointed, but only a moment. I could still make it. By tonight I would have twenty total bricks. Tomorrow morning, I could get more bricks in there and get it all started again. It would be fine. I was going to make it. Though there was still the possibility that bricks weren’t the only thing the tool would need.

Focus on that later. I needed to focus on the now.

I heard the chicken clucking in the coop, and I quickly moved to it, a few minutes remaining on my timer. I walked into the doorway and saw the chicken pecking at an empty feeder. I magically placed more food in the feeder, which the chicken happily pecked at before I checked the box. It was an egg. Another food source.

I took it gently and ran inside as the seconds ticked down. I gently placed the egg in the storage area, and sighed as the time finished. Alright, I had all day now dedicated to decluttering the pink room.

And it needed all day. The first level was full of clutter, but this second floor felt like the place people hid their hoarding. There were boxes upon boxes of junk. Old clothes that they no doubt grew out of. Jackets, coats, pants, socks. An obscene amount of socks. I was a bit confused by it all.

I used up some stamina to carry as much as I could downstairs and onto the porch. Just like in the heat, there was something about the covering over the porch that kept the effects of the cold weather from hurting my stamina. It was good to strategically place boxes and bags of stuff on the front porch to be ready.

When the front porch was full of boxes, I ate another warm bowl of potato soup and spent the next fifteen minutes dropping the boxes and bags in the dumpster. It was a pretty good system, though I tried not to feel deflated when I walked back up the stairs and seeing the small dent I made in the pink room after a good three hours of work. Oh well. I had all day.

I chipped away at the room, slowly unveiling the hardwood floor beneath. I had a pretty good idea that this was what was under that brown shag carpet on the first floor. I was fighting a very strong desire to rip all the carpet up to check. There would be a way to do that, though, right? Take down the eighties paneling and what not? The excitement that alone brought forced me to remember I was in a game, possibly in a coma in real life, and I needed to figure out why I was here.

It was hard to tell the time of day with the rain pelting the windows. The entire day was dark. It was strange not to tell the time of day by eating anymore. I was never hungry, and even if I did need stamina, I was only ever nauseous, not starving. In fact, the only time I could tell it was evening time was I had to pull out my flashlight for certain areas of the room to keep working.

The greyness of the day darkened as I grabbed the leg of a table and pulled, but nothing happened. I was hoping to move the table to better get the stuff underneath, but it looked like it was glued into place. I stood up, brushing myself off, and examined the table with a flashlight. There were a few things still on top, and I grabbed the clothes and bags of socks and set them down. I then grabbed the blanket cover and pulled it off to see a sewing machine. I raised an eyebrow, curious.

Cannot use sewing machine until room is decluttered.

I held back a smile. This must be the reason why the to-do list specifically asked me to declutter this room.

Well that just motivated me. What did that sewing machine do? There were so many possibilities, but I didn’t dare get my hopes up.

Instead, I spent longer than I wanted to upstairs. It was getting darker, and it got to the point where I could only see with the flashlight. But I gathered the last of the things from the room and hurried out of the pink room. At this point I would wait until tomorrow to see what the sewing machine did.

The rain continued to pound on the top of the house as I quickly used my stamina to go outside and gather the ten cooking bricks. It took a chunk of my stamina, but I could spare it. I essentially just grabbed it then put it back into the brick tool to hold it there. The tool wouldn’t allow me to put more clay in there until the morning, and a small part of me hoped that this upgrade would allow the brick tool to make things overnight.

“Hint, hint,” I said to those above me.

I rushed inside and brushed the rain out of my face. I shivered for a few seconds before the rain evaporated off myself. I tried not to think about how weird that was, just in case the alien overlords overheard that. Honestly, I wasn’t too worried because it fit with the game logic of everything.

Killie was on the couch again, relaxing as she licked her paw. No weird ghosts, then. Great.

I spent the hour before bedtime cleaning the countertops of the bathroom, and when that was done, I sighed in relief as the bars of stamina and sanity extended again.

“Fan of this, not going to lie,” I said, placing all the stuff under the sink. More stamina and sanity. All a win in my book.

I was walking into the kitchen when I heard something coming down the stairs. I froze, not sure what to expect. The old stairs creaked, and I tried to peek inside the living room to see if Killie was reacting to this.

I didn’t notice the stairs had stopped creaking until I saw something appear on the ground of the kitchen. Footprints, covered in blood, headed toward me.

I screamed, scrambling into the living room. Killie sat up, confused, but I scooped her up and ran into the bedroom. Was it time to sleep? I didn’t care. I just wanted to get that image out of my head.

As soon as I thought of sleep, my vision went dark and I was more than happy to drop off to sleep.