Lil tries a different tack this time, reading faster,

Logstart

“I have to console myself, I try to explain to myself that I tried not to kill it, and I tried not to have to kill it. As far as this day or two is concerned, I woke up, was bitten and chased almost immediately after getting dressed. I hid, passed out, explored again. Then I fought, won, and walked away. I tried to act merciful so I could drink in peace. Then I was attacked again. Drawing on my limited experiences, I can personally say it’s the worst day I’ve ever had. Well the worst as far as I know. Now, what’s worse, even when the creature ended up dying anyway, it didn’t leave a body for me to eat. It just turned into some stupid pouch that I could make out of leaves anyway. Oh well, might as well take the pouch. Right? Yet as I lean down to pick it up, more of those rectangles pop up, with words in a script that I can’t comprehend. Or the script is just illegible because the rectangles themselves aren’t really fully forming. Regardless, these ones say things like ‘bag’ and ‘expand inventory’ and ‘tooth’ and ‘egg’ and ‘meat.’ I’m mostly interested in those last two, as my stomach feels like it's gnawing on itself.

Not having any fire, or really knowing how to make one, or a safe way to prepare or consume an egg, I leave that aside for now. While trying to accept all of the rectangles, the bag disappears. Frustrated, and panicking, I try to think intensely intently about ‘meat.’ Before long, what looks like a cartoonish cylindrical chunk of meat, with a bone sticking through it, yet somehow steaming-hot, appears in my vision. Honestly it’s at least as large as the creature it came from, if not larger. What? How? As with the first rectangle, I flail to try to grab it, and this time my hand actually connects with the bone. I’m able to pull the meat out of my mind’s eye.

I work on devouring the meat, but even the eating process seems, well, weird. I also just noticed that I can look back into my mind’s eye, and read a word-for-word journal. The day’s events appear in that barely-legible script from the rectangles. At least I’m fairly certain that’s what it is, and that it’s every thought I’ve had since I woke up. If I study this journal thing long enough, I’ll probably learn the language,or script, or whatever it is. Once I finish with the meat, more emotions overcome me in waves as I feel truly lost and alone. I don’t know how to make sure I’ll have a next meal, let alone where it will come from. The trees don’t seem fruit-bearing, not that I know what an edible fruit would look like, I think.

I’m going to have to stay close to water, unless I make something that can hold enough water for several days, and I don’t think I can even carry something that heavy right now. But if I have to stay close to the water, then other things probably have to come to the water too, right? But do I really want to just sit around a river, and ambush things to eat them? That sounds horrible! At the very least, I’ve got to, I don’t know, travel up and down the river, maybe I’ll find a part of the river that’s a pond with fish north towards the mountain. Or if I travel away from the mountain, maybe I’ll find an ocean.

One of the surprising things about the area is how homogenous the plant-life is. All the same types of trees, mostly roughly the same shape and size, most of them have vines hanging down, yet few vines litter the forest floor. Similarly, the canopy is composed of massive leathery leaves, yet few carpet the forest floor. The trees are relatively smooth-textured, the bark is nearly indistinguishable from the trunk from afar.

I realize I really want my walking-stick back, so I look for a crossing point to try to head back to the other side of the river. After I find a crossing point, I walk back upstream, eventually finding my walking-stick right where I left it. When I bend down to pick it up, it disappears just as my hand closes around it. Perturbed, I look around to make sure I’m where I thought I was, and investigate the groove on the ground where the stick was a moment prior. It was definitely here. I try focusing, determinedly thinking about my walking stick, pondering if it’s like the meat now, and suddenly an image of it appears square in my mind’s eye. I reach for it, and suddenly it pops into my hand. Bemused, I try thinking things like store, and unequip. Unsurprisingly, my walking-stick disappears again.

I start to experiment. Does where I grab the stack in my mind’s eye matter? Yes, if I grab it from the end, it appears in my hand being held from the end instantly. I also don’t have to physically move my hands to the location of my mind’s eye. I can imagine my hands traveling to grab things. So this must be the effect of that ‘expand inventory’ box from earlier. I mean, I probably should have figured that out back with the meat, but I was starving, in pain, sad, upset, and honestly a bit convinced that I was having a hallucination or fever dream about the whole ordeal.

Oh hey speaking of being in pain, I’m not in pain anymore. I forgot to bandage my wounds, but as I check my right shoulder and bicep, they are already starting to knit up slowly. Both areas do look like I’ll have some fairly noticeable scars for a while, but if I’m this short, I’m probably still growing, hopefully, maybe. Please don’t let me be this short forever. I’m literally a bite-sized snack for things like bears or predator-cats if I ever run into one. Well, maybe not literally. I can’t truly judge my exact height. Definitely over a meter, definitely less than two, no idea where in-between the two. My memories say that that might actually be average for humans from certain regions. Crud.

Wait, does that make it better or worse? My knowledge about youth and adulthood is lax in a lot of ways. Am I even a child? Am I a human? Perhaps my assumption that someone my size shouldn’t have the vocabulary that I do is just a poor assumption based on misinformation. Regardless, my right shoulder and bicep weren’t nearly as deeply hurt, due to the bark and sap reinforcements. Instead of long rakes of flesh, the injuries over there are small, yet deep for my tiny size, punctures.

Whilst I’m thinking and pondering, I practice with my inventory. I walk in that direction that I dubbed North, upriver. Did that sound pretentious? That sounded pretentious, didn’t it? Me dubbing something. Oh well, there’s no one here to hear me, as far as I know. It’s not like anyone else has access to this weird mental journal thing.”

Logstop

Lil takes a minute to giggle at the fact that I thought no one else could read my mental journal. I mean, I was correct at the time, I think. Lil can only read it now that we’re in a party. Even then, only since we gave one another permission to read our mental log sections.

Lil tries to blitz through the remaining events of this day, hoping we’ll make it past any further trauma.

Logstart

“If I orient myself, at the beginning of the day, I was northeast of here. I was exploring southward, then was ambushed from the west, and escaped further southward. After hiding, I heard the water northwest. I then headed westward, and was ambushed from the north. Now I’m heading north again, so I’m making a pretty big U shape across this region of jungle type forest.

Preoccupied with my thoughts, I barely hear the sound of air rushing. It strikes me that the sound is the beat of immense leathery wings. I freeze in my tracks as my eyes widen with fear. Dragons!? Running to the nearest tree, I whimper and hug it at its base. Scanning the now tempestuous canopy I spot a silhouette that appears somewhat akin to a pterodactyl. Or perhaps it’s a pteranodon, either way it’s heading southwards downstream. I let myself breathe a sigh of relief, firstly that it’s not a dragon, secondly that it’s heading away. Also how do I know what a dragon is, and why did it instill such fear in me? And one more thing, how do I know what ptero whatevers are? How do I know that creature was one of them?

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A bit frightened to continue, it having been quite a number of hours, I scour for another giant-sized leaf that’s fallen. Once I’ve got one, I dig another little ditch to hide in at the base of yet another concave tree. I spend time trying to think up a course of action for when I wake, but pass out almost immediately, drifting off into a less nightmarish slumber than previously.

This time, my dreams are filled with floating boxes with menu options, in a font or script I don’t recognize. As I pace around a dark space that’s empty save for these boxes, I think to myself that neither I nor this world make sense. This is more like some sort of video game, or virtual reality dive, or what I think they call Isekai. While we’re on the topic of me not knowing how I know words, how do I know that word, and how do I know it’s from another language than all the other words I know? Stumbling through these darkened corridors I notice a mild shine in the distance, it begins to grow into a full on light at the end of a tunnel. This encourages me to promptly turn around, and walk away, with an ‘Oh heck nah.’

When I awaken, it’s stiflingly, blisteringly hot. I start to immediately regret the insulation of the sap and bark. I begin thinking to myself that I’d disassemble this armor and just wear the leaves again if I could. Not long after this wishful thinking, rectangles appear, I agree to them, and suddenly I’m wearing my first outfit. Or rather the bark and sap seems to have been disassembled and stored in my inventory. That’s quite an intriguing little ability. I, being the curious one that I am, try to recombine them. Suddenly I’m once again insulated in my enhanced armor. I disassemble again, and reassemble again, trying to pay very close attention, to make certain nothing is lost in the process, and seemingly enough, everything is exactly the same each time I change the states of my clothing/armor.

Eventually, to avoid the heat, I put most of my armor and clothing into my inventory. I then scrounge some more leaf-leather, bark, and sap. I then try to imagine moving some padding from my chest armor to my bicep covering, or to my back armor, and so on. It does seem to be possible, and it looks like I can do that all in my mind while the materials are in my inventory state, without even having to sew or glue things together. Talk about convenient! Heck, it’s a far better crafter than I am honestly. If I think simply about turning the materials into clothing or armor, my inventory obliges, and I’m presented with something that far-more resembles clothing than just some hanging leaves. I keep messing with this newfound ability for hours whilst I walk northward. Eventually I notice a blue bar has been slowly decreasing in my mind’s eye picture of my inventory.

Concerned, I stop everything for a bit so I can really focus on this to figure out what it is. When I pause my inventory manipulation shenanigans, the blue bar begins to increase. When it seems to top off, I begin messing around with my inventory again, and sure enough, this little blue bar decreases. Eventually, when I actually let it bottom out, there’s a tiny tingling sound, or sensation, and while it’s empty, I can’t seem to get inventory functions to work instantly. Or maybe at all? But it starts to climb back up almost immediately, so I can keep doing things with my inventory again basically instantly regardless.

Experimenting with this, I notice that when sitting down to relax, the blue bar recovers more quickly. So I sit still for a bit to let my bar top off, then I imagine bursting through dozens, maybe hundreds of combinations of inventory changes at an incredibly fast pace. The speed of processing and the vision in my mind’s eye blurring so quickly actually makes my head hurt for a moment. Almost instantly the blue bar bottoms out. I get that pleasant tingling ringing type of sound again. Not having anything better to do for the moment, and it being sort of enjoyable, I spend at least half a dozen hours doing this while walking.

I walk while messing around with inventory in my head, sit for a while, playing with this blue bar. I work at getting it to bottom out and top off repeatedly, often getting that pleasant tingling. At first it seems to only happen at bottoming out or topping off, but eventually it becomes more and more infrequent. Now it’s happening at seemingly random intervals in the process.

This feels like mana in a video game. Whatever that is. I think whenever I spend enough of it, my maximum capacity increases, or maybe my regeneration rate, or both. Weird skills to, wait a minute, skills? I start thinking about the word skills as hard as I can, and my mind’s eye begins to shuffle rectangles into view. I think there’s one with a label or heading or something to the effect of crafting and one called something like space.

Intrigued, I try summoning and dismissing things from my inventory and back to it, rapidly, repeatedly, whilst watching this space number, and an indicator beneath it slowly grows until the number increases. So space has something to do with this sort of kinetic manipulation of extradimensional space. That makes me wonder, what do the higher numbers mean? Is it just an achievement to track how often I use things? Does it unlock new potential abilities to use in relation to that skill?

Regardless, further down, there are some numbers in various boxes that seem to equate to maybe pain tolerance, or maybe pain defense? One for pierce, one for blunt, both of those are terribly low. Similarly there appears to be the same two in a kind of offense category. Curiously, and perhaps a bit foolishly, I take out my walking stick, and try to bonk myself on the shin, giving myself a really good whack, and probably a bruise. Sure enough, there’s a tiny indication of growth in the offensive blunt and pain tolerance, or defense of blunt. Rubbing my shin, feeling my own chagrin, I’m glad there’s no one else to witness my foolhardy embarrassment.”

Logstop

Lil bursts into laughter so hard that they snort at the fact that I whacked myself to learn about skills, even more so when they realize I thought no one would ever find out about it. I blush, but hug them close since I know what they’re about to read.

Logstart

“That thought leads to me remembering that there is nobody. I haven’t had contact with anyone else. Somehow I know that’s not a normal thing, that I’m a human, or at least a humanoid, and normally when there’s one humanoid, there’s more. What’s more, usually when there’s humans, there aren’t flying dinosaur looking things, or monstrous digital sphere things that break apart into polygons in some sort of deresolutioning, derezzing I guess, until they vanish. I could still be wrong about being human. I’m not sure if that would be better or worse.

Trying to put that lamentation out of sight and out of mind, I focus on the numbers page again. I end up trying to climb a tree. Sure enough, a new category appears. I leap down from the ten feet up I’d been able to climb, and several indicators rise in various defensive or survival categories. I try running northward while looking at this page, sorting through the rectangles. While running I find several indicators are rising, the most poignant appearing to be stamina.

I suddenly black out for a moment from a tiny concussion. I had just run face first into a tree at high speeds due to not watching where I was going. I was distracted by this skills page after all. I think I’m somewhat addicted to numbers raising, like some sort of skinner box dopamine phenomenon. Whatever that is. I think it has only been a few moments since I ran into the tree, since I’m still not any hungrier yet.

I start jogging northward further. Playing with my inventory, my bar that I’m calling my mana drops, and I briefly rest to restore it. Finally, I reach the sight of sights, my savior and salvation. A river offshoot that ends in a pond. The thing is a wondrous beauty all its own, all the moreso a marvelous image to behold for a starving whatever-I-am. The cliff is in sight to the north. The pond is on the west side of the river, well, west as I’ve dubbed it. Ugh, again with that pretentious dubbing. Anyway, thankfully due to some rock formations, the river is a bit slower and shallower around here, so I can cross back and forth with ease. At least, it’s a bit slower and shallower near these rocks, it seems to be slow near the waterfall at the cliffs, then speed up, then slow down again around here. Does water velocity usually change that much in a short distance?”

Logstop