The group of sparsely armored scavengers left the safety found behind the walls and followed the small trail out of the building's perimeter towards the tree line. He didn’t remember there being a thicket of trees in the scrap planet but then again, the game wasn’t really known for its flowery prose when describing scenery.
It gave him a slight appreciation for his predicament and the discoveries he was making outside of the bounds of the game. His fascination with the trees that surrounded them were so great that his cursory inspection of their various properties revealed a hollow metal trunk with a pseudo-organic root system coiling through that void in a well managed wiring system.
The base of the tree where stump started to meet earth did not reverberate as if hollow, an incision into the wood being nigh impossible with his current gear.
His temporary side track from their mission was still fruitful, even if it was more unknown variables thrown into the mix of figuring out his situation.
“Aurelio,” Kalani called out to him, “You haven’t forgotten about this have you?” She waved her forearm around to show the new element on the Exo-Suit.
On their walk, only Cantwell had messed around with the gauge, tapping on the measurement display with clear fascination. His distant gaze was now focused on Aurelio now that the topic of the gauges came back up.
He relented with a sigh, “I’ll do my best to explain things then.” He motioned for them to gather around.
“Alright, so, the Exo-Suits function with these cores, yeah?” Aurelio pointed to the faulty core at the base of his spine. “They’re the power source for the Exo-Suits.”
Elena impatiently tapped her foot on the ground, “Get on with it. We’re burning daylight out here.”
He rolled his eyes, “Well the blessing bestowed upon us gives us the ability to use Ignition. Think of it like that fire in your heart that pushes you to keep going despite the odds. It's made manifest with the ember core on our chest.” Aurelio tapped his chest with a satisfying clink sound for good measure.
“What does it do?” Cantwell asked.
“That’s where things get fuzzy in my explanation. Fundamentally, Ignition feeds power into an action. Need to run further? Draw power from that well and burst with temporary speed. Need to inspire a comrade to continue their assault? Feed their flames with your own and give them the boost they need to continue. All the stuff we build out here responds to Ignition as well.”
There were slow nods from his audience. To be expected, considering the circumstances. He was making assumptions with that last statement but his core assumptions felt solid intuitively.
“So it’s like magic?” Kalani asked.
He shook his head, “No, no. Although it could be considered such if your flames were powerful enough but no. It’s not an external resource. You’re stoking your fires to perform feats not possible to regular humans.”
“And what about the gauge? The thing we fucking asked you about.” Elena growled.
“Well that ember core of yours is using the suit's physical core as a conduit. And where there’s fire, there’s heat.”
Cantwell slammed his fist down on his open palm, “The gauge measures how close we are to overheating the core.”
“Right on the money there, Cantwell. The gauge goes from zero to ten with milestones being recorded as ‘Warm Up’, ‘Danger’, ‘Critical’, and ‘Meltdown’. And before you ask, reaching the meltdown marker on your core is gambling with your life. Your physical core can explode, leaving you a pile of meat paste on the ground.” He’d lost numerous characters to an unlucky meltdown roll and he wanted his crewmates to be certain that expending Ignition without precautions was not good.”
“That’s it,” Elena pulled out from the rest of the group to face down Aurelio, “You fumbled about looking at trees to avoid telling us this? Just don’t use the thing and you’re fine. Why the fuck would anyone commit to that kind of gamble.”
Kalani stepped up and pulled Elena back, “You of all people should know why we’d need something like this on our side.”
Elena spat back, “We were caught in an ambush, Commander. If we were prepared, we could have defeated that thing without damaging the freighter and avoided this whole mess.”
Aurelio laughed, “I guess it’s true what they say about some soldiers being thick skulled meat heads.”
Elena pivoted on the ball of her foot and slammed her fist squarely into his helmet, sending him to the ground.
“Elena!” Kalani shouted
The woman ignored her superior, stabbing the [Carbon Cleaver] into the ground before approaching a downed Aurelio.
“I don’t trust you and I don’t like your attitude. Just because you were chosen by the rock doesn’t make you better than us.”
“Better than you all? Not at everything, no. But until you have this knowledge for yourself and do a little bit of thinking, maybe you should defer to my guidance and not struggle so hard with forming coherent thoughts.”
Before Elena could begin her assault, Cantwell bearhugged the woman from behind and restrained her with his massive frame.
“Let go of me! Someones gotta teach that condescending fuck a lesson!” Elena shouted.
Kalani walked up to Elena and punched her in the face, “Think about the information he just gave us, you animal!” Her yell was passionate, raw. It reduced Elena’s squirming by quite a bit.
She continued, “We’re not going to survive on this planet long if we don’t have an advantage and he’s the only one right now capable of providing us with that. It doesn’t take much observation that we fucking struggled with the first monster and that thing was in disrepair. Imagine what would have happened if it was in better condition?”
Kalani paused, waiting for Elena to bite back with something, anything.
“If you don’t want his help? Fine. But while you’re on the field, you’re gonna trust him to have your back or you’re going to fucking die. Offer me the skeptical perspective; you’ve been my right hand for a reason. But trust in my judgment to assume that the stranger isn’t motivated to see us fail. All of his behaviors up to now suggest otherwise.”
What air was around them stagnated into a still, tense, miasma. Not even the planet dared to make a sound in their moment of conflict.
“Let her go, Cantwell. She’s cooled off enough.” Kalani walked past Aurelio and marched along. He wiped the grime off himself and followed after her, Cantwell trailing just behind him.
It was slow moving at first, but Elena joined up with the rest of the group after a few minutes of alone time.
---
Eventually, the trees began to recede and thick fungal stalks began taking their place. The firm earth beneath their feet soon became mushy and soft, black ichor rising from the ground with an uncomfortable squelching sound with each step they took forward.
The Metal Mire.
Aurelio and his brother considered it a sort of starting zone due to its dangers being front loaded to the setting as opposed to its monstrous denizens. The whole place was meant to be a twisting and meandering quagmire filled to the brim with wreckage and debris of ships and other objects.
He could see in the distance a capsized vessel visibly sinking into a pool of sludge, writhing tendrils subsuming the metal down to each nut and bolt.
The sky was dark but the caps on the tree-sized fungi maintained a sickly green light that illuminated the way for them.
“What in the world…” Elena whispered.
“Look alive, crew. I’m setting up the surveyor.” Kalani pulled out a boxy device with two radio dishes on either end. She placed the box on the ground and touched a button on the side with her boot. The device whirred to life, a thick metal rod shooting up and over the fungal coverage into the sky above.
Aurelio’s visor indicated that something was being loaded into his sight and sure enough, a translucent map of the immediate area appeared in the bottom corner of his vision. The others pinged on the map like blue dots, with a larger red dot indicating the location of their quarry.
“Doesn’t look far.” Cantwell noted.
“Not at all,” Kalani turned to Aurelio, “Anything we should note about our trek before we beeline it?”
That was a difficult question to answer. If the dangers out there were like the tabletop game, their surveying phase would be denoted on a track. Events would be placed on the board and the monster would be… four or five events away from them.
The Topographical Pulse scan moved the monster closer to the scavengers on the tracking board, which was probably why their quarry was so close to begin with.
Guessing that much, at minimum they’re hitting two events specific to the monster and an event specific to the biome.
“The swamp is going to be more dangerous than the monster. We’re going to want to stick together and we’re going to want to group up. This place has a way of fucking with your sense of direction so stay focused and we should be fine.” Aurelio answered.
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“Alright. Take point behind me, Aurelio. Cantwell, third. Elena, cover the rear. Let’s move.” Kalani recalled the surveyor and moved in the direction towards the monster.
Their march wasn’t long before the first event revealed itself. He didn’t know how or when they’d crossed the threshold, like blinking and suddenly suffering under a lapse of time.
He only noticed that they’d moved onto the first space when a thick wad of swamp sludge lept out of its puddle and attached to his right arm.
“Ah!” Aurelio yelped as he felt the insect-like buzz on the plating dissolve. He violently shook his body to shirk the sludges advancements. The others were dealing with their own environmental hazard, Kalani being the unluckiest of all by having a globule of sludge surround her head.
An ink bubble that she viciously tore away from her face with an understandable panic.
“What the fuck!” Elena growled having lost the plating on her right leg to a receding tentacle.
“Hm…” Cantwell looked unperturbed despite the loss of armor on his left arm. Instead, his curiosity had him staring at the writhing pools of ooze. For what purpose, Aurelio wasn’t sure.
“Is everyone okay?” Kalani asked, the frame of her helmet still sloughing metal like a silver paste.
“Yeah.” Elena replied first.
“Yes.” Cantwell said.
“Yup.” Aurelio confirmed.
Kalani sighed in relief, “Good, good. Even with our guide warning of these events, we still ended up getting caught off guard on our route.”
That was an issue for Aurelio. They’d been caught off guard but the lapse in judgment was unnatural. It was as if they’d briefly been moved along in autopilot and thrusted upon the environmental hazard.
Looking at their surroundings made this issue more overt. The meandering path that they’d taken following the monster was insidiously overwrought with thick fungal stalks.
They were much closer to the monster than before as well.
“Do you hear that?” Elena whispered.
Aurelio closed his eyes and focused his attention to the environment. There were great bellowing things in the distance, the rumblings of titans rising and falling from slumber. The bubbling caustic sludge around them that buzzed with activity.
And then he caught the trilling sound.
It was a faint hum, an otherworldly tune that had his hairs stand on end. Their map reacted to the singing as well, distortions forming below their location as something snaked and coiled their way.
A prompt appeared before Aurelio.
|?Let Fate Decide?|
Same text as in the radar station. Same fuse counting down the seconds to force him towards making a split decision. He crossed his fingers and pressed down on the prompt.
The letters dissipated and motes of light jumped above the heads of each crew member, including Aurelio. The motes grew in size and morphed in shape until they became dice.
A pair of spinning dice hovered over their heads with Aurelio being the only one who appeared to be cognizant of their existence.
Everyone made their roll.
Kalani got a two and a six. Elena got a pair of threes. Cantwell got a four and a one.
Aurelio rolled snake eyes.
Fuck.
“We need to move, now!” Kalani yelled out. The crew charged forward through the gaps between the fungal stalks with near preternatural moment to moment decision making.
Even the massive Cantwell was making short work of navigating through the increasingly dense environment, leaving Aurelio further and further behind from the rest of the group.
As expected by letting fate decide.
“What a stupid fucking decision.” Aurelio cursed as he desperately pushed to avoid the consequences of the event. He was familiar with this event.
He’d fucked his first character with this event, the dice not on his side then as they weren’t on his side now.
A new prompt appeared in front of his eyes.
|Reap What You Have Sown|
The message boiled his blood.
“What the fuck you mean, reap what I’ve sown? The fates fucked me over!” Aurelio yelled at the fading prompt.
Whatever.
As the straggler of the event, he’d need to roll again to suffer the consequences of being left behind at the hands of the singing presence snaking its way towards him.
The stress of the situation made it difficult to recall the roll results in his mind. He knew the consequences for rolling incredibly low but the actual description for what he’d suffer if that consequence came to pass was not written in the base game.
Gaining the Something Different disability was not a result he wanted to suffer but he couldn’t take matters into his own hands to figure out a solution.
What a fucking awful situation.
Just before the prompt faded, Aurelio interacted with the display and summoned another pair of flaming dice.
He rolled.
The dice landed on a four and a six.
The intrusive sounds grew louder around him and he struggled to maintain focus on the thread of light that formed above his head.
His vision distorted as thoughts of laying down and resting filled his muscles with fatigue.
“You can be so much more…” The voice whispered.
“You can do so much…”
“We only want to help… we’re all in this together…”
Aurelio felt their words worm their way into his mind. He gave their suggestions an unnatural consideration, as if his opinions were taking on a life of their own, arguing for him to rest and allow them to take over.
Stumbling through the fungal stalks while following the thread along, the voices began to recede away from his mind and a gentle warmth began to envelop his body.
Emblazoned on a charred fungal stalk was a smooth marbled stone, a visual symbol for fire branded on its smooth surface.
Instinctually, Aurelio reached out for the stone and touched it, feeling an even warmer sensation at the tips of his fingers.
The singing disappeared entirely once the stone made contact with him.
“Woah.” Aurelio whispered. It felt as if his mind had found clarity and his spirits were lifted to match. He looked down at the stone in his hand and couldn’t remember its name or its effect.
He opened his diagnostics sheet to see if it had anything listed.
[Piloting] - Scrap Suit
[Piloting Proficiency] - 0
[Innate Weapon] - F.K.S.B. (2+ Spd |10+ Acc | 0+ Str)
[Current Weapon] - Metal Spike (2+ Spd | 8+ Acc | 2+ Str)
[Passive Gear: 0/5] -
[Active Gear: 0/5] -
[Trinket: 1/1] - [Odd Stone]
[Equipped Core] - Faulty Core
[Thresholds] - Warm Up (1) | Danger (5) | Critical (7) | Meltdown (10)
“Odd stone…” He muttered. For the life of him, Aurelio could not recall the effects of the trinket but having one so early was a good sign at the very least. There were two trinkets he could remember off the top of his head.
The first was likely gone, the [Black Finger] that could be acquired through some lucky rolls during the tutorial portion of the tabletop game. The other was located in the Metal Mire but he was certain it required a minimum number of Academics and he didn’t have that stat raised.
Speaking of stats…
[Name] - Aurelio Cancio
[Status] - Healthy
[Second Wind] - {X} {X} {X}
[Species] - error
[Heart] - 1
[Ignition Regen] - 1
[Ignition Cap] - 11
[Role 1] - None {LOCKED}
[Role 2] - None {LOCKED}
[Mov: +0 | Acc: +0 | Str: +0 | Eva: +0 | Spd: +0 | Lck: +0] (+3!) {LOCKED}
[Weapon Class Specialization] - None
[Spark Level] - 0
He slapped his hand across his face.
“I’m a fucking moron.” Aurelio groaned. He’d been so busy trying to get ahead of the situation and assess the differences between the game and this world that he’d forgotten to take advantage of the starting boon.
Whatever system was managing his diagnostics sheet didn’t want him to alter his stats either now that they were in the surveying phase.
He sat on that discovery and wondered why the system felt it was prudent to restrict his actions in that way. He could understand why the game would lock stat changes like this as there were some events that could be passed or failed depending on a scavenger's stat values, but that shouldn’t have been an issue unless the world's various events functioned under a similar game logic.
More questions. So many more questions.
Aurelio placed the odd stone in his inventory and pressed forward towards the rest of his group, the minimap having since blinked back to life.
There was an antagonism between the game elements and the world elements that his presence was blurring the lines on and that made him all the more curious to find answers.