Alex woke early – the sun wasn’t yet peeking through the open window of his room at the inn. As he lay beside Erin, her chest and arm overlapping his with her left leg also wrapped over him, he thought about his first day on Marin.
Ripped from work, I was too-rapidly flung through a quick skill selection. Given no direction other than “save all civilization!!!” and tossed to the wolves: literally, as it happened. With Erin’s arrival I lucked out – I didn’t have to stay up that tree until I could kill enough wolves to safely move around. Then I traveled with her to pick up her game and head into the village.
The guards at the entrance ended up being the most attractive women I saw last night, so I’d bet that they were high-level for this area and received the boost towards “ideal form” that higher stats gives. They didn’t stop us at the entrance, but they asked Erin if I was new and after quick introductions we moved on to catch the butcher. I forgot their names almost instantly, unfortunately. I’m horrid with names.
Apparently, here, the butcher receives a lot of business from the town’s Dungeon Wardens. Erin is one. They check to be sure that the local dungeons aren’t loosing too many monsters upon the world. If the dungeons are sending out too many monsters, it’s an indication that the dungeon will soon send almost every monster it controls out to attack nearby settlements. Anyway, back to the butcher: she gave Erin a chit which she can use to retrieve the various parts from the animals today after the butcher gets done processing them or which Erin can use to get funds from selling them to her. The butcher could process the meat in the morning because she had some kind of a cold room – I could see the chilled air coming out as her assistant moved through the door with Erin’s game.
After that, Erin took me back through the lanes of the town to the West Inn where I met the innkeeper, Marta, and Erin prepaid for the week. It was two small silver, five large copper, and four small copper coins. A meal usually cost 11 small copper coins and the room would cost 3 small copper so the week should cost 252 small copper. The extra two copper coins were for a chance for Erin and me to visit the cleaning room – where you could wash your body. She paid 2 large copper and 2 small copper for supper for the two of us that night.
Ah yes, the currency is simple:
* 10 small copper to 1 large copper
* 10 large copper to 1 small silver
* 10 small silver to 1 large silver
* 10 large silver to 1 small gold
and so on, with the hierarchy moving from copper through silver, gold, platinum, and elementium. Erin said that platinum is used for large transactions, but elementium is basically only ever spent by nobles paying fealty taxes. Oddly, the currency is supposedly tamper-proof. The magic that’s used to create the coins is only known to a very select group of monks who train for decades before being able to use it and no one has ever come remotely close to being able to trick their wands. The wands are given out to each community larger than 200 people.
Erin snorted a little in her sleep and squeezed his body with her arms. She moved her head a bit on his chest and then began breathing deeply once again.
So, back to my night. Since we were both pretty sweaty from our respective encounters and then the walk along the dusty pathway, we went immediately to clean up. To my surprise, the inn didn’t have separate bathing facilities for the different sexes. Erin went first, then I went inside and quickly used the lye soap and rags to scrub everything down.
I dressed in my single tunic and trousers only after I beat a bit of the dust out of them – next time I find myself with only one change of clothes, I’ve got to remember to attempt to clean the clothes before I get clean myself. I quickly swiped a rag over the dust I’d ended up getting on myself and called it good.
Erin and I had a great soup for supper with some fresh vegetables on the side. Water or fruit juice were available without paying more so we both opted for the juice which replenished some immediate reserves due to its sugar content. The rice in the soup was great for our long-term energy and the protein, though I didn't know what it was, was plentiful and just a bit gamy. I had two bowls of the soup and Erin, to my surprise, had four.
After our meal, we retired to my room. It was on the first floor – Marta lives above the inn with her daughters. Erin and I wasted no time getting to know each other – though we were both a bit nervous because neither of us had practical experience. Yes, it’s a bit odd for a person to get to our age without having had sex, but I wanted to find the right person when I lived on Earth. Here, I was nearly under a compulsion to have sex of some kind and I didn’t really have to time to be sure that I was compatible with a lady before moving on.
In the end, I don’t regret it. We took it slow to start but after the initial pain, Erin was passionate and enthusiastic – so was I. We treated each other well and made love for what felt like hours before my body was finally sated. Towards the end Erin needed me to do most of the work, but I understood that her muscles were going through significant changes whereas mine were not.
Thankfully, Erin knew a spell to keep things quiet so that we didn’t disturb the other guests. She had to cast it a few times, but she could feel when it was waning so we didn’t make a ruckus.
It was a great night.
Alex reminisced for a few more minutes, but then Erin snorted again and woke up. She blinked a few times, then lifted her head to look at Alex. He, of course, began to have a male’s typical morning enthusiasm when in bed with a sultry woman pressed up against himself. Erin noticed the change under her left thigh and, grinning, she continued their exertions from the night before.
Afterward, the sun was beginning to shine through the window so they got up and got dressed for breakfast. The inn was serving bread, scrambled eggs with meat, peppers, and cheese, and a kind of hot sauce that was used to spice up the eggs. They called their stirred up omelet an “Egg Mess”. The bread wasn’t like the sweet and soft stuff you find in stores in California where had Alex lived or anywhere else in the USA. It was hard on the outside, almost like an eggshell, and chewy and rough on the inside. It was also bland to Alex’s palette, but he didn’t know enough about baking to have any ideas on improvements so he soldiered through and decided not to comment about the bread.
Erin and Alex left the inn together and she took him by the herbalists’ shop in town to borrow some gathering tools.
“Good day, Mother Edith.” greeted Erin upon entering the shop. The shop had a tiny lobby space just before a counter in ‘U’ shape which enclosed the lobby space. An older lady with snow-white hair and wrinkles on her wrinkles sat at a counter space to the left of the entrance and had been clipping the roots off some herbs when they entered.
“Good morn, little Erin,” replied Edith as she continued to clip her herbs. “I’ll be just a minute.”
She hadn’t even looked up, but Erin took it in stride and simply moved to stand in front of the counter. Alex followed and took a look around the shop. On Edith’s work counter were a number of herbs in various bundles and stacks. Above the counter was clear, but the rest of the head-space in that half of the shop was taken up by drying racks hanging from the ceiling with masses of herbs clumped up. The smell was strong and earthy. It overwhelmed the sinuses in equal measure to the pleasure it provided.
In the center of the shop, directly in front of the duo, was a wall with shelves from floor to ceiling populated exclusively with potion bottles. These were vials that were in different uniform sizes varying from the most popular size about the width and length of a thumb to the largest sizes of about the size of a child’s juice tumbler or two adult shot glasses. Each vial and position on the shelves was marked with the name of the potion inside the vials. The potions varied across a wide variety of colors from green to blue to yellow to purple to red to pink and many more. Most of the potions were at least faintly glowing.
On the right side of the shop, Alex saw another work counter with two young girls – certainly not even 14 yet – using mortar and pestle to grind up some herbs and prepare some potions. The vials were already in holders in front of the girls and the various ingredients were laid in a row in front of them. The rest of the space held various tubing and apparatus that looked like it belonged in a chemistry classroom or in the science room of a distillery.
Hearing a creak from his left, Alex swiveled his head to see that Edith had gotten down from her stool and was approaching the front counter. She sat down on a stool before them before speaking.
“So, Erin, who’s this now?”
“Mother Edith, meet Alex, a Traveler. Alex, Mother Edith, the town’s herbalist and apothecary.”
Edith smiled at Alex and took firm hold of the conversation: “So, have you felt the goddesses’ spell yet? Is that why I’ve heard from three different women that Erin didn’t return home this night but spent her first evening at the West Inn?”
Blushing, Alex replied “Erin and I have decided to help one another out for now. She’s not only saved me from a standoff with wolves but helped with that spell you mentioned as well as lending me the money to stay at the inn for the week until I’m able to stand on my own feet and pay her back.”
Erin giggled a bit as he was explaining himself and said “He’s treated me well Mother Edith – he even asked me first if I was available and willing to help out. We’re here because he’s taken Herbalism and Potions as a way to get by and I was hoping you might be willing to lend him some tools to get started planting his turnips in these skills.”
Edith hmm’d while looking at Alex and then between Alex and Erin. “Alright girl, leave him to me,” she stated.
Erin turned Alex’s head with her hands and gave him a firm and quick kiss then whispered into his ear “I’ll see you tonight at the inn after supper. I’ve got to Warden work for the day. Stop by the inn around lunch – you won’t be far enough away to make a packed lunch more valuable than the chilled air at Marta’s.” With that, she breezed out the door and Alex turned back to Edith.
She gathered some items from around the herbalists’ side of the store and returned to the counter. Showing him 3 different herbs for a healing potion, 3 for a mana potion, and 3 for a stamina potion she instructed him to go just outside the town walls and circle around the town to dig up the herbs. All of the herbs were common ingredients for potions and so they were cultivated magically around the town. She handed him a trowel and a large wicker basket so that he had a way to remove the herbs and a way to store them before returning.
“Fill the basket up with at least enough herbs for 3 of each type of potion, then come back here to learn how to make the potions,” Edith instructed. “It shouldn’t take you all day to do it either, so I expect to see you back here before lunch. Be sure to harvest the mana flowers last. They leak mana constantly so it’s best that they be as fresh as possible when you’re making a potion.”
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“Thank you for your guidance, Mother Edith” Alex replied before he left the store. He walked through the town back towards the west gate and exited through the stone walls before taking a short stroll along the northern side of the walls. It was only a short journey before he saw the beginnings of the flower fields.
The fields were arranged up against the walls of the city in a space that was cleared of the surrounding forest. The open area was about two hundred yards wide. The flowers themselves were sprinkled around in patches and swathes, looking far more like the glade where he arrived on Marin yesterday than a planted and kept garden.
Before harvesting these plants, I should check my skills again and find the one which helps me to identify useful plants. With so many nearby, perhaps I can power-level the Herbalism skill. status.
Name
Alexander Carpenter
Level
1
Title
-
Health
230
Mana
230
Stamina
230
Constitution
10
Intelligence
10
Endurance
10
Hp regen
0.639
Mp regen
1.562
Sta regen
0.639
Vitality
10
Wisdom
11
Metabolism
10
Ah, shit. I forgot that I need to look at the abilities instead of the main status. I’ll just – my Wisdom increased! Why didn’t I get a notification for that …
After poking around for a few minutes, Alex realized that he had no way to know if his stats or skills increased in power. Apparently, his status and other systems were designed to be as minimally invasive as possible – probably so that children didn’t totally freak out when messages first flashed across their vision or so that you wouldn’t receive a notification that your Wisdom increased when you were in the midst of parrying a death-stroke.
I guess I just need to see if I can add this information to a log in my interfa –
Alex’s mind opened again and he remembered some new skills. There was a simple scripting language that could be used to adjust the interface. He could easily tie change notifications to a new tab in his interface which he decided to call simply ‘Change Log’. While the first change to his Wisdom wouldn’t be recorded since it had happened before he added the changelog, he should be able to look back at the log after his next skill or stat increase and see the information he’d included in those messages. He decided to put the time, date, old value of the stat or skill and the new value of the stat or skill as well.
I can’t believe that there’s time and date information in this interface. Erin judged time by the sun’s position yesterday, so I expect that most don’t know it is available. I’ll have to see if I can help her to access it because if everyone had access to the precise time and date trade, engineering, and so much more could be done more precisely. Ack – I’ve wasted enough time, it’s 8 am already, I’d better get to picking flowers.
He pinned the time and date to the top-left of his interface so that it would be completely invisible until he stared at that point for 3 seconds – now he could see the time and date quickly while it wouldn’t interfere with his vision. With those actions completed, he pulled up his abilities and toggled on the Detect Herbs ability and got to work harvesting the plants he needed. He worked for two hours, collecting enough herbs for 5 of each potion except for the mana flowers which were needed in all of the potions. After collecting the remaining herbs, he headed back to Mother Edith’s store to complete the potions.
She welcomed him back to the store, then immediately put him to work at the work-table where the two young girls had worked previously. He separated all the herbs into piles. The first potions he made were the mana potions because they required the most mana flowers – the most time-sensitive ingredient. He cut out the portions of the herbs that he needed, mashed them to a fine consistency mush, scraped the mush into a small metal pan, added water to the pan, set a fire to boil most of the water out, carefully stirred the potion while it boiled, and then finally bottled the result in the smallest vial that Mother Edith used on her shelves.
He was fortunate that Mother Edith was helping him directly because she kept him focused on doing each step when he had free time. He didn’t waste much time preparing the potions and was thus done in just a little over two hours with all 15 potions. Mother Edith lined his potions up in front of him on the table and looked at them, then examined him.
“Well, child, how much do you think these are worth?” she asked him.
Alex stared at her blankly. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. Phoebe, the Goddess of Change, had recommended that he get Identify but he had completely neglected it.
I have no idea how much they’re worth or how I’m going to be able to keep myself from being ripped off. Alex thought to himself before responding to Mother Edith: “I’m afraid I didn’t take the Identify skill though Phoebe did tell me I should. I just completely forgot it.” He shook his head at his situation.
“Dearie, that’s okay. Identify is one of the easiest skills to obtain.” Mother Edith began to point at the bottles in turn from his left to his right. “This first health potion heals no more than 5 health per second and will last for 3 seconds. The second is 5 hp per second and 4 seconds. The third: 6 hp per second and 4 seconds.” She continued with the first three mana, then the first three stamina potions.
“So, that ought to have gotten you the first level of the Identify skill. It’s something the Goddesses recognized as being universally necessary so opening the skill is a matter of minutes. Tell me what level your identify ability is now, please, little Alex.”
changelog Alex thought.
12:36 pm – Identify skill change from level – to level 1
12:37 pm – Identify skill change from level 1 to level 2
12:37 pm – Identify skill change from level 2 to level 3
Hmm … it must be quite easy to progress through the early levels of this skill because of how useful it is as well as how much information one needs to make an informed decision about all kinds of things. I wonder if I can tell the qualities of the rest of the potions. Ah, the ability is just a toggle – and it’s on!
"I'm level 3 in Identify," Alex mumbled.
Alex confirmed that the potions Mother Edith had already identified showed the same things she’d read off to him earlier, then he moved on to the rest of the potions he’d produced. Each series of potions showed that he’d progressively gotten better at making potions. Indeed, the mana potions were the worst of the lot by far simply because he had prepared them so poorly.
“So”, commented Alex, “these are probably the worst possible potions. I can see that you have a full wall of potions, so I’d expect that we probably wouldn’t get much from selling these … either that or you sell a lot of potions.”
Mother Edith giggled a bit. It was an odd sound coming from someone whose wrinkles had wrinkles, but it fit her grandmotherly vibe pretty well: she appeared to Alex to be sweet and kind. She replied to his speculation with “Well, for those potions you’d only get a few small coppers. What I’ll suggest you do instead is sell them to me and I’ll use them for practice for the two girls who are trying to learn some tricks here: they’re about ready for the stage where we should talk about distilling potions down to make an originally weak concoction stronger by removing the conflicting impurities.”
“I’ll buy each of your failed attempts at 3 small copper for today and tomorrow, but after that I’ll expect you to have progressed to the point where you make 10 units per second brews lasting at least 30 seconds. A potion that you have to keep quaffing in the battle is less than useless – you’ve no time to actually hurt your enemy.”
Alex didn’t think about the offer at all. He knew his attempts were laughable – and with the few coppers from today, he might be able to buy some more herbs from Mother Edith to progress his Potions ability even further. In fact … “Mother Edith, I agree to that deal, but I’d like to buy enough herbs to make as many potions as possible first thing in the morning. That way I can increase my experience in Potions far faster than just by using the herbs that I harvest. I’d only want to take two small copper coins for a chance to wash tonight.”
Mother Edith agreed to his request and shooed him out the door to get lunch. He ate quickly, not even truly tasting the meal. He also didn’t notice how busy the inn was or the looks that he received from most of the guests: a new man was in town and word had already spread. He was examined by almost all the eligible ladies in town before the meal was over and he didn’t have a clue: he was far too focused on tweaking his interface and changelog.
He first added a “level 0” default for stats or abilities that he hadn’t learned yet. He also modified the script he’d written to pull data from the abilities list to also pull data from the skills list – he’d forgotten to include them earlier. He added a large health, mana, and stamina bar across the top of the interface and made them semi-transparent. He made all three bars go from fully transparent when they were full to fully opaque when they were at or below twenty percent. Finally, he looked about for some way of telling when something was progressing – he couldn’t see an experience bar or anything of the like for any of his skills, abilities, or stats. After poking about for the better portion of ten minutes, he finally gave up and put the question aside for later.
He spent the time from 1:30 pm when he finished his lunch and left the West Inn, until 5 pm gathering the herbs he needed to make quite a few new potions. He spent the remainder of the time until 7 pm in Mother Edith’s shop focusing on trying to improve his Potion-making ability.
Though Mother Edith didn’t help him to keep moving, he’d gotten the idea from her earlier comments and moved quickly through his work. In just a little under two hours, he ended up making 25 potions. This was far faster than his earlier work and the potions, all of which he was able to Identify, were all better than his best attempt from that morning. The best potion was still under Mother Edith’s requirement at 7 stamina per second for 23 seconds. He handed over these failures to Mother Edith and walked to the West Inn.
Erin was waiting for him when he arrived and so they got supper together. “The Wardens guarding the slime dungeon which is due south of Scottstown – there’s a second dungeon filled with spiders south-east of town – saw a few red slimes outside of the dungeon,” Erin said as they were finishing up their meal. “Those are typically confined to the second level of the dungeon or as leaders of packs of blue slimes and rarely come outside. With at least 3 different sightings outside the dungeon, there’s going to be an attack sometime in the next month. Tomorrow, I’ll be going with several other Wardens to check out the first floor. We’ll be back after supper but we’ll be totally safe. I’ll see you a couple of hours after dusk, probably.”
Alex replied with “Well, I’ll be staying up to see you. Let’s get cleaned up, then I’ve got something to show you in my room.”
After they each cleaned up, they retired to Alex’s room. Alex remembered to beat his clothes before getting himself clean this time.
“Have you heard of anyone using the interface to tell what time of day it is?” opened Alex.
Erin blinked a few times, then scrunched her face up in thought. She sat there for a few minutes hmming and looking into the distance. When her eyes finally focused on Alex she said “That sounds incredibly useful. People could meet at exactly the same time. Battles could be coordinated to start precisely on time. Trade could be made easier and even cartography and navigation could benefit. Is it possible?”
“I’ve got the time on my interface, but I’m not sure how easy it will be to spread it to others’ interfaces. If you don’t mind me looking at yours, I might be able to figure out how to get it done.”
Erin blushed as she looked at him for a few seconds. He probably doesn’t realize how personal that information is seen to be. Ah, well, I’ll make that point with him later. status. She made a few motions with her hands as if she were grabbing the interface and spinning it around for him to view it.
He spent only a few seconds looking at her interface before he found the scripting portion of the interface at exactly the same spot as his own. Coming around to sit beside her on the bed, he asked if she could see the same thing that he did – and she could after he explained what she should look for. Then, rather than entering the text himself, he opened the script he’d used to pin the time to his interface and shared his own interface with her.
She blushed, again, but copied his script word for word even though she didn’t understand it. After he confirmed that she’d made no mistakes, he told her how to activate the script and she gasped, then giggled for a full minute looking at her new timekeeper. Erin dragged him down into the bed immediately and Alex was once again happy that she knew a sound-canceling spell.