Lil shrugs at my internalized questions before continuing,

Logstart

“One of the things I’ve realized is that I can store momentum in an object when I put it into or retrieve it from my inventory. I think, or maybe it has something to do with that space skill. If I imagine the object coming out of the inventory, it will eject in that direction. If I imagine it appearing to be sent towards my hands from behind them, moving forward quickly, it can slip out of my hand, far faster than I could throw it. Thusly noted, now being at a pond, where I spies all kindsa little fishies, I’m going to do what I’ll probably dub spearfishing. Also, hey me, don’t hate me for dubbing things, we’re the only me that exists, so we get to dub stuff. Or maybe we can dub step, I don’t know.

I lower myself into the pond slowly, and just wait at the edge, barely moving. I’m still continuously dinking around with combining and disassembling my meager materials in my inventory as always. I even sit, floating cross legged in the water, my butt bobbing onto the bottom of this edge of the pond occasionally. I feel a little bad as I see a fish curiously approach my hand that’s held in its direction. I feel less bad when I see it bare its fanglike lips and try to chomp at my fingers. I jettison my pointy-stick from my inventory right into its mouth while paying attention to my skills screen. My space and offensive piercing skills both jumped significantly, as well as a defensive one that says something like reflexes. The fishy poofs, crackling into a million jagged polygons like the spherical creature from before. This time in its place appears to be a, I think it’s called sashimi? I have no idea what that is, but I think this is it. Or rather, these are them, since it’s like a small rack of them on a plate.

I reach out for this sashimi fish based foodstuff, and mentally click through whatever boxes try to clutter my mind’s vision. Once the fish meat appears in my inventory, I immediately take it out and start to eat it. I’m still ravenous, since this is only my second meal in the two or three days I’ve been here, or alive maybe. I probably should have gotten out of the water first, because all of a sudden, dozens of fishes are zooming in my direction, with their fanged little lips and actual teeth bared. They’re like little, pointy, angry, scaly torpedoes. I start thrusting with my makeshift spear, enhancing it by making it disappear and reappear with more momentum, and realize it’s not enough. Worriedly, I experiment using one hand to keep thrusting and jettisoning my spear, while the other shunts my walking stick forward, parallel to the bed of the pond, knocking away a half dozen fish. Then I have to close the distance, and grab my walking stick back.

Wait, do I have to close the distance? I try to imagine just picking my walking stick back up, and sure enough, my walking stick disappears. Now that I realize I don’t need to physically grab my weapons every time I launch them at a fish, I start launching and recalling them more quickly. It’s so fluid that it’s almost like an endless barrage, despite being only a single object.

The largest fish, about equal to me in size poses a much greater challenge as it’s aiming my way. My stick bounces right off its scaly exterior. Panicking, I think of what I have available, so I combine the sharpest, largest stick, sap, vine, and a fang, to make an actual spear, and launch that. Bingo! Well, it made a dent at least.

As I’m distracted by the looming threat of a fish that I now realize is slightly larger than myself, some of the smaller fish start to tear into me. I forgot to re-equip my extra armored padding. After taking numerous nicks and cuts and scrapes, and getting some fangs lodged in my tender flesh, I correct that recent mistake. Seven more space-skill jettison thrusts of my new spear is enough to finish off the big fish, and also to drain what I believe to be my mana bar, which seems to not be refilling enough to do any more inventory shenanigans at the moment. Realizing this, I have to finish off the little fishies by hand. This means I’m slashing and stabbing with my spear, since the fang has a sharp edge and a sharp prong as well. I do need to wield it with two hands at the moment though, swinging it through water is challenging.

In my tiny corner of the pond, when motions seem to cease, and I see and sense no more angry fish coming my way, I survey the destruction I’ve left in my wake. There are dozens of sashimi platters, and several pouches scattered about. There’s even a somewhat ridiculous number of circular coin-like objects, and even some green rectangular paper just sort of floating in the water, but I don’t mean floating like paper would float on water in my memories. I mean it floats suspended at whatever elevation I slew the fish at, at this oddly specific forty five degree angle, spinning in a circle in place.

I wade through this section of the shallow end of the pond, and snag all of the, I guess loot. Even in this shallow end, some portions of this corner of the pond are deeper than I am tall, so I have to walk on the floor of the pond. There’s also a steep dropoff just beyond this corner, my heart skips a bit, for some reason it terrifies me beyond all reason. It’s as if any monstrous horrifying thing could be down there. After seeing pterodactyls or dragons or something earlier, my mind dredges up images of sea serpents or krakens or other tentacled things rising from the depths to lash out at me and tear me apart, dragging my bits down below.

Having thoroughly terrified myself after collecting the objects in the pond, I crawl out and run to the nearest tree. I quickly end up hiding behind it, then immediately dig a little ditch and cover it with a giant leaf yet again. There, under my leaf blanket, I sit, panting from both exhaustion and terror. I retrieve the sashimi that I’d partially eaten in the pond, and finish it off while resting.

As I rest, I of course play around with combining and disassembling the various things in my inventory. New fangs, a large variety of smaller scales, a number of scales that are ridiculously large to have come from any of the creatures I slew. The scales from the big fish might actually make better armor than the bark, it’s hard to tell. I toy with the idea of making a bow with either some of the vines, or with the sinew that dropped as loot. I doubt that I could ever make one that would cause projectiles to reach the velocities that I can already do just from expelling things from my inventory at high speed. Speaking of inventory jettisons, my space skill jumped to fifteen, my piercing skill jumped to seventeen, and my blunt offensive skill jumped to eight. My slashing offensive skill jumped to two, whereas I don’t think it had previously shown up at all.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

I’ll continue like this for now. At least I know where my next meal is coming from. Well, I’ve got several next meals in my inventory at the moment already. Still, hopefully more fish show up here at some point. I don’t want to have to hunt up and down the river repeatedly. If I come to another pond, I’d be more careful to not wipe out its entire piscine population.

Seems luck is with me, or, well, the world is weird. Plenty of fish already again. I spend my days resting and occasionally fishing, careful not to eat in or near the water, my wounds close up, though I’ve some tender pink scars. I’m not entirely certain what to make of my life. I somehow have knowledge of more than this, but not memories of where I have that knowledge from, and no idea what to do about that knowledge. I vaguely recall a world that should exist, one that contradicts my world, this reality. The one in my memories had no magic or weird skills that require an esoteric seemingly external limitless energy source, no mental inventory interfaces with perfect memory logs. Or well, none of those things exist outside of videogames. But then again, maybe a world without magic is what doesn’t exist, one where videogames are more than just some databank word that is in my head. I’ve only got a few days of existence and memories to judge from, and all evidence so far points to this being reality. I’ve been injured, I’ve slept, eaten, nearly been eaten.

At nights, well, what I call night, since it doesn’t ever seem to get entirely dark. I can see a warm glow from the top of the cliffs, and it fills me with curiosity. Perhaps some day soon I’ll find a way to ascend the cliffs or find a cave system that leads to the top, just to see what that glow is. At least it’s a goal, right?

If I sit around fishing and eating until I die, I think I’d die of boredom or insanity before I reach old age. Speaking of age, is that something I should know about? What if I’m already an adult of whatever species of creature I am? Are my preconceptions of what someone my age should know and be able to think about right or wrong? Will I ever meet anyone, let alone someone that’s survived into old age? Am I alone in this world? Is this a world? What if it’s a game? What if it’s an afterlife? Am I dead? Or reincarnated? If I am or was an adult, if that’s why I have these thoughts and this knowledge, what kind of person am I? Or what kind of person was I?

Not knowing why or how I know things bothers me greatly. I know I’m missing out on things, but I’m not sure what they are. I have vague notions of how things are supposed to work, and yet, some of those notions prove untrue, at least here. I’ll have to make the best of it, but it is lonely, tiresome, and almost boring. At least I don’t have to stick to a routine. I know, or at least believe I know, that food normally needs to be prepared or preserved, but here, creatures become food instantly. Plus in this mental inventory system, at least for several days at a time, possibly forever, food does not seem to spoil. So I could in theory travel an almost indefinite length journey after stocking up.

I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been here, awake, alive, alert, whatever, at this point. I know it has been some days at least. After several days, I think my inventory capacity is the highest it can become, at least for now. If I were to equate it to something from my memories, certain games you had literal backpacks, and you could carry maybe 4, maybe 8, maybe 10 backpacks, and each backpack could hold so many items or so much weight. I think it’s like that. Several times, pouchlike objects appeared after slaying fishies, and now, I’ve collected so many of those pouches, that I can’t collect any more. They stay floating in the water, spinning endlessly, for several hours, or maybe days. I haven’t really kept track. But after some amount of time passes, they disassemble into polygons like the fish had done themselves when dying. I was able to snag a few pouches that just sort of sit in my inventory, not really being consumed or added to my own capacity. I’m not sure how it works, or why. Those ones do seem to be of a more rare variety though. I feel like I’ve hunted, or fished so much, that I would have decimated a population in the world that only exists in my broken memories.

To be fair to the fish, at least here in reality, there seems to be an endless supply of them. If this is some sort of spawning pool, then it must be mating season. Well, then again, all the fish seem to be roughly adult, so they couldn’t have just hatched. Maybe it’s a more literal spawning pool? Well, figuratively more literal. I mean abstractly metaphorically, it’s a meaning of the word that is literal, but doesn’t normally exist, at least in my memories.

In certain games, in certain locations, creatures would just pop into existence, and it was known as spawning. Sometimes this would be in, on, or near an object, like a nest looking thing, or an area of webbing, or a throne, stuff like that. So in essence, a spawning pool, where fish go to mate and leave their eggs, could be an actual spawning pool, where fish just appear into existence.

The longer I’m aware, from that first day, I guess I’ll just call it Day One, which I really shouldn’t have even named or thought about, as it strikes me with panic. Even just naming it sets my heart racing. It sets my pulse pounding into my ears, and sets my vision to tunneling. Anyway, the longer I’m aware, the more I can equate my life to video games, and the more I remember about them as concepts. Just terminology, meanings, genres, things like those sorts of facts pop into my mind. Anyway, thinking on the tropes that I somehow know are prevalent in the types of games that I know the most about, I feel like the only thing to do is to call this pool home, and explore outwards from here.

My first destination is going to have to be the top of the cliffs to see what that glowing is. It could be people with fires, it could be technology, it could be virtually anything. I also get the notion that it could be dangerous, so I try to ascertain my skill levels, to see if they might be suitable for a journey. I focus on the page that seems to indicate stats and skills.”

Logstop

This time when Lil pauses, I haven’t fully devolved into panic, it’s a bit of an out of body experience, hearing that I had that particular panic attack. Lil butts my chest and snuggles close before continuing.