Several days further into hiking, and camping along the riverside, Lil finally awakens.

“Hzz,hmm zso where we at?” Lil sleepily asks from my hoodie pouch.

“Lil!” I exclaim as I summon my pouch into my inventory so I can turn around and tackle Lil to embrace them. “I was so worried about you! You’ve been out for days! Maybe a week or two!”

Lil, still confused and groggy, asks, “Days? I guess forced evolution takes a lot out of a pal huh?”

Now I’m confused as I ask in response, “Forced evolution? When you transformed like that? How did you force it?”

Lil’s answer surprises me further, “I didn’t partner, you did.”

I shake my head, perhaps in denial, “Me? I was just crying like a tiny scared child in a raging river, and you were getting beat up.”

Lil insists, “I felt your energy flow into me, it must have been just enough to barely force the evolution, because I had to go into energy debt to fight the bear.”

I continue learning more and more about our world through the strangest means, but, wanting clarification, I request it, “Energy debt? You can do that?”

Lil has to hazard a guess, “Yeah, it’s not the best thing to do, sometimes it expands your energy, sometimes you lose energy to make up for it, and other times it just zonks you out for a long time. Apparently. This is the first time I’ve done it.”

Huh, that’s an interesting factoid or ten. Truly useful info that I’d better keep in mind. I acknowledge, “I’ll have to keep that in mind, I might have been doing that all the while.”

Lil continues to educate me, “Normally there’s a safety limiter in place so you don’t do anything too crazy with energy debt, mine broke in the fight against the bear. It’s back to normal now though.”

It dawns on me, the boxes during the Vampguppy fight, they asked if I wanted to limit break. Excitedly I gather, “Oh, oh! So that’s what that limit break thing was when I was fighting Vampguppy.” I roll my eyes at my own past self. Really Reggie, you couldn’t figure that out back then? It’s a pretty common videogame trope.

Lil, also excitedly, guesses, “Ooo, is that why you could make a million radiant copies of your spear and shoot fire? Well okay, like five or six copies, but it was still cool!”

I blink several times rapidly, making sure I heard and processed that correctly, despite it not being external audio to interprect, “Huh, so I wasn’t just seeing double while passing out, I really did that?”

Exuberantly, Lil claims, “Yup yup!”

Okay, yeah, Lil was right in that case, I have to admit, “That, well, that is pretty cool.”

“Hah, totes, but never do that again pal, you had me terrified for you.” Lil laughingly agrees, then playfully admonishes me.

I return the sentiment, “Well the same goes to you Lil, I was worried sick these last few days, grrr.”

We both growl angrily at each other, but can’t keep straight faces for long as we laugh and embrace once more.

Now aware of what energy debt and limit breaking can do, I check out our relevant skills again.

I notice that my mind’s eye accidentally ticked a sort of mental checklist box, and now all of the boxes are gridded, I guess it makes it slightly easier to read? I’ll keep it for now, as the script has become more readable in the last few days, or my eyes have adjusted to it. I’m dismayed though at how much energy Lil lost from going into energy debt.

“Oh Lil, oh no, that’s so much energy gone.” Expressing my dismay, I hug Lil and stroke the top of their, well, head I guess?

Lil approximates a shrug without shoulders, “It’s okay partner, looks like you’ve been busy and got some more to make up for it, maybe you can do that radiant spear thing now?”

I shake my head, fairly certain I could do no such things, “I doubt it, I think it can only happen in emergencies, even then, I don’t know exactly how it triggered, it just sort of happened.”

Lil insists, “Well, why not give it a shot?”

“What, just imagine shooting fake copies of my equipment?” I frown, Lil makes it sound almost easy to just create new magical abilities on a whim.

Lil once again approximates a shrug, “Sure, what’s the worst that could happen?”

I frown as I glare at Lil, “Oh I dunno, going unconscious for days, leaving you to fend for yourself, ya big meanie.”

“Oh, I suppose that could happen.” Lil extends the word could, emphasizing it in a sarcastic tone.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Alright, suit yourself, I’ll give it one try.” Saying this, I turn to face a nearby tree, and just imagine copies of the wolflike fang, bright and shining, flinging out and into the trunk.

Nothing happens for several seconds. I roll my eyes and sigh exasperatedly, but I start thinking about energy debt, and energy use. I wonder if maybe there’s magical numbers and amounts required to trigger certain things. I’ve been consciously, and subconsciously, trying to use the blue energy bar in certain ways, like rapid small amounts. What if I think about using exactly one hundred energy to do something, can I put that much energy into it? While pondering these thoughts, my space skill seems to catch my line of thinking. About a fifth of my blue bar disappears. After which, a single glowing fang ejects from my mind’s-eye-space into reality. The projectile thunks into the nearest tree trunk tearing through it, bursting out the backside. It speeds away into the forest somewhere.

“Woah.” Lil and I exclaim simultaneously, and laugh at how we both sound in our astonishment. I check to be certain, and sure enough, no actual items were expelled from my inventory, I haven’t lost any material. The glow fades from where the fake fang landed somewhere in the jungle. I assume it disappeared, like the extra spears used against Vampguppy. I’m rather curious what would happen if I launched something straight up. Would it dissipate in the air or fall back to the ground first?

Desiring satisfaction for my curiosity, I prepare, “Lil, I want to try something, but we should take cover. I’m going to throw something really high, at least I think I will.”

“Hm, okeydokey.” Lil bounds around to the other side of a tree, peeking out from behind it, watching me with curiosity.

I aim as close to completely vertical as I can, and think about spending a hundred energy to fire another copy of a fang into the air. The radiant fang copy veritably rockets out of my mind’s eye space into reality, upward, upward through the canopy. I hop behind the tree where Lil’s peering out from, and gaze upwards, waiting, waiting. There doesn’t appear to be any sign of it coming back down however. Lil and I give each other a curious look, and I shrug, Lil approximates a shrug without shoulders.

I have to ramble to interpret everything I’ve just learned and witnessed, “So, apparently that’s a thing I can do now. I’m not sure if it’s any better than just launching something, and calling it back, and doing it again several times, but it does seem to have a lot of force and velocity behind it.”

Lil agrees, quipping, “Yeah, when I put stuff in and take it out, it just kinda pops right in front of my face. Your space skill is kinda scary.”

I raise an eyebrow, “How so?”

“Imagine if you could put me or you in your inventory, then launch us out, FWOOM we’d be zooming miles and miles in no time! But we might also go SPLAT on a tree or something.” Lil adds onomatopoeia to their response.

I chuckle at Lil’s excitement and onomatopoeia. Good gravy, I have this appearance, and I use words like onomatopoeia, and expel, and velocity. My brain screams at me that this isn’t normal for someone my, uh, species, or height, or age, or something, I just can’t shake it. Based on my logs, I’m only a few weeks old, which obviously can’t be right. Can it? Also, how would I know anything about my species or race, when I have no one to compare myself to? Ugh, my brain makes no sense. Lil is still explaining in a chipper manner how cool it would be to be able to launch ourselves around, like a more powerful version of their hopping.

I try to think it through to a logical conclusion, “Oh yeah, I guess it would be kind of like that. Also it would maybe be a safe space in case a battle got too tough, though I’d be worried to go into my inventory, since when I summon things out of it, they come to me, but if I’m in it, and try to summon me to me, I’ll just summon myself where I am, in the inventory.”

Lil, frightened, iterates, “Oh no, getting trapped in there would be mega bad, mega mega bad.”

I nod, entirely in agreement, “Yeah, life was lonely enough with a wide open world to explore, trapped in a few boxes would be insanity. Speaking of loneliness, I was trying to think of how to create a foundation for a community that could draw people, or well, creatures, beings, to want to join it. If we could maybe make things that just can’t be made elsewhere, stuff that makes life easier.”

“Like what?” Lil innocently asks.

It takes me a moment of contemplating to reply, “Well, if we had metal tools, we could eventually make machines, rollers and conveyors that move stuff along automatically. So if we had to get stuff from one place to the next, without, you know, firing it out of my inventory at someone, it could be done safely and quickly, without anyone needing to do it themselves.”

Lil presses further, “Huh, but what sorts of stuff would you have to move like that?”

They do make a good point. I admit my own ignorance, “I honestly don’t know, right now, I imagine raw materials, metal and ore, to make more of the rollers and tools and stuff, but that seems kind of circular.”

Lil brings it back around to a joking quip, “Heehee, like a roller?”

The smile on my face hurts as it stretches with unspoken laughter, “Oh you goofball, yeah I suppose so. Anyway, I’m glad you’re feeling better. You’re surprisingly light, so it was no big deal, but carrying you without you chatting made me feel so alone. It felt like I was just going to end up as a big pile of bones along a riverside, dead of old age. And you would never wake up.”

As I think about the type of community I’d like us to forge together, I think about actually forging, and I worry about being able to move into the metal age technologically. I don’t think I can just invent metallurgy, or even mine minerals with, like, a sharp rock or a fanged spear. Lil rambles about how they’ll be more careful with energy debt, but that they don’t regret it, because they were going to fish me out of the drink as it were, meaning rescue me from the river rapids, while they were able to fly.

As we hike further south yet, I play around with using larger and larger sums of energy to launch things from my inventory. Somewhat surprisingly, my energy limit climbs far faster than when I was doing thousands of small combinations that barely used any energy in a few seconds. Over the course of the next two days, I’m able to get my energy limit over two thousand! Though I feel kind of drained, a little pooped out as it were. The progress slows down massively now that I’ve reached a seeming plateau of power.

My pace while hiking becomes unintentionally rather languid as I practice skills. I’m able to launch two copies of an object for about a hundred energy now, depending on the size of the object, or five copies of it for two hundred energy, though bigger ones cost two hundred fifty to three hundred to launch five copies of. I think as my space skill rises, the amount of energy to multiply and expel larger objects lowers. Could you imagine if I could get one of the duplication shots down to zero energy cost? I know that the space skill responds basically instantaneously, I could launch a thousand things in a second if I think of zero energy cost expulsions. Sadly, it seems like I have to specifically use a hundred energy to begin the ability though.