Logan stared at the crystal. Then he looked at the door. The frantic, animalistic screeches were muffled but still distinct and blood curling behind it. Tentatively, possessed by remarkable foolishness, Logan took his weight off the door and watched it eyes and mouth wide open.
The creatures struck at it in quick succession.
Thud. Thud.
Nothing happened. The door, identical to the one they had busted through, held for some reason. Logan looked at the dim rock he was holding.
Some magical reason.
Well, Logan wasn’t about to wait until whatever the hell he had done to the door waned away. Without looking back, he went onwards, hoping there weren’t any more monsters lurking around in the shadows.
Fortunately that wasn’t the case, and Logan quickly found that in addition to the magical blue light, some natural light became more apparent. Logan came to an intersection. The ways left and right seemed to curve backwards, both apparently leading back into the depths of the dungeon. The way forward formed an ascending ramp, atop from which the sun shone in. Logan wasted absolutely no time considering his options, like a man starved, he went towards the light with a singular focus.
A bright and humid afternoon greeted him outside. Yellow little birds chirped upon a branch of a nearby tree and looked at him curiously. Logan smiled at the sight. This new what the hell ever it was couldn’t be all bad. The birds were so plump that it was a small miracle they had managed to get on the branch. That was food sorted if it came to that. Birds that fat also told a tale of an environment rich in resources.
Indeed, as Logan looked around, the forest he found himself in was lush. It wasn’t exactly a jungle, but it was thick and wild with a myriad of colors and smells. Nearby was a thick shrubbery of several tightly packed bushes with gleaming black berries studded on it. Fighting over it, jumping from bushbranch to another were two of the smallest little monkeys Logan had ever seen. They were the size of a squirrel and their tail had a hand with which they jumped from branch to another, as they gibbered and chased each other around.
Now, Logan wasn’t stupid, despite his dad sometimes suggesting it. He knew there was a reasonable chance that if he just put something in his mouth haphazardly, he might end up being poisoned. Even if the monkeys clearly thought the berries valuable, they could have a resistance to the poison. But Logan also knew that he needed to take calculated risks.
He went up to bushes, which drove the monkeys away. Logan picked up a berry and smashed it between his fingers. The scent was sweet and rather neutral, resembling a blueberry.
“Okay, genie. Do an assessment or something. Are these edible?”
[Reconfiguring Neural Matrix… 3% Completion]
That was the only answer Logan got.
“What good are you even?” he muttered to himself. “Okay let's try another way.”
He picked up one of the blue crystal chips from his pockets and plucked a few berries to his other hand. “Shazam. Detoxify these. Make them edible.”
The crystal didn’t seem to do much. Logan took a look at it.
[F-grade Numa Crystal, 100%]
“In hindsight I should have checked the charge first…”
Logan shrugged. He had taken all the precautions available. His instincts told him the berries were kosher, so he ate one. It was sweet and had a strange fresh aftertaste, as if sucking on a needle of a pinetree. Logan made the executive decision of taking his shirt off and tying the sleeves on his neck, to form a hip pouch. He filled said pouch with these berries. He ate half a handful.
“Unless these are super deadly, this amount should just make me ill.”
With the immediate threat of dehydration and starvation staved off, Logan took another look around. The sun was shining in the sky. Or a sun. Logan didn’t want to make it too complicated, so the sun it was. This was probably another planet. While Logan wasn’t the most acclaimed biologist known to mankind, he didn’t recognize any of the flora or fauna around. Not to mention the sun was more orange than he was accustomed to.
Stolen story; please report.
Well, all of this is really interesting, but what I need to find is my people. Freya’s the one I want, but I’d even settle for my old man when stranded in a quasi-jungle after being teleported to an unknown planet.
Logan tried prompting the Numa-crystals by suggesting they somehow help them find people. Nothing happened. He needed to understand them better. It was a good start to just try doing everything and anything with them. They had worked with the door. That had been a literal lifesaver. But not with the berries. Probably because the berries were edible. Logan wasn’t feeling any sort of ill.
The chance of a false positive in this scenario is approximately 87%.
“Sheesh,” Logan muttered. “Talk about intrusive thoughts.”
Since Logan had nothing better to do but to pick a direction and walk towards it, that was exactly what he did. The sun felt pleasant against his shirtless skin, and he ventured to grab half a handful of some of the berries he had collected. Strange sights were to be seen left and right.
There were tall palm trees with rough plated bark that extended thirty yards into the air. On the top branches red fruits dangled from thin green ropes. A flock of big black birds, like vultures, were resting on the ground next to a small pond. The pond was green and it bubbled idly like a witch’s cauldron.
“Probably not good for drinking… Sulphur?”
Rich methane deposit. Location memorized.
“Right… That is going to take time to get used to.”
The vulture-like birds suddenly cawed as if in terror and took to flight. A green feline, the size of a panther had pounced and was now ripping into an unfortunate bird. The cat didn’t look particularly zany, apart from being green, clearly for camouflage. But it still made Logan’s adrenaline pump up again. As beautiful as this world might be, there were still predators around.
It looks happy enough with its prey, but I’m not gonna stick around to find out if it wants dessert.
Logan wasn’t about to run off mindlessly. The cat had actually glanced at him, but was too busy ravaging the bird to give him a second look. That was fine by Logan. He carefully kept watch between where he was going and the cat. Eventually he walked through a copse of leathery leaves and lost the cat.
Yeah, so there’s predators. I need weapons. Can I use these Numa-crystals as weapons? What if I tell them to explode when they hit someone? Would that work? One way to find out.
“Simsalabim. Make it explode when it hits something. Make it go boom.”
Logan threw a crystal chip a few yards away at a mossy rock where the green grass wasn’t terribly long. Nothing happened. He shrugged. It was worth a try. Logan went and searched around for where he had thrown the chip. Even though he didn’t quite understand what he was dealing with, he understood enough that these things were valuable.
He sat down on the rock and grabbed another handful of berries. As Logan idly munched on them he rubbed the little crystal between his fingers and thought.
Okay so it won’t work if it isn’t needed, as proven with the berries. It worked with the door. Why? It didn’t work as an explosive? Why? Because it was alone? There was no catalyst? It needs something to work on. I have a few of these, let's do a simple test.
Logan got up and walked around. After a bit he found a hefty stick on the ground under a robust tree. He picked it up, crouched and pressed a Numa-crystal against the stick with his thumb.
“Bibbidi Bobbidi— Okay, yeah, not doing that. Make this stick a spear. Make it sharp, smooth, straight and hard.”
The crystal in Logan’s hand immediately came to life. It hummed and Logan could feel the energy within it. Then it went dim and the stick Logan was holding morphed. The object became like floating liquid as it took a new form. It was still a stick, but it was somewhat smoother and straighter.
“Holy shit,” Logan muttered as he stuffed a hand in his pocket with haste.
After three more F-grade crystals were spent, Logan held in his hand a smooth little spear, a smidge over a yard long.
“I guess it’s more of a javelin. Hey smart guy, how’s the aerodynamics on this?”
[Reconfiguring Neural Matrix… 7% Completion]
[Formulating linear regression model…]
[Calculating the average RMSD…]
[Evaluating the drag coefficient…]
“What the…?”
[The root mean square deviation is approximately 4.3 millimeters. Drag coefficient is approximately 0.3. This one suggests using another Numa-crystal to bring these values down.]
Logan stared blankly at particularly nothing. He hadn’t expected that to… Well do whatever insane thing it had just done. As any self-respecting person with a life outside of a coffee-stained notebook, he had no idea what sort of sorcerous gibberish the device in his head had just produced. Despite his gargantuan flaws, his father was a smart man, and he was really good at exploiting even smarter men. So this ridiculous thing in his brain was probably right.
“What kind of adjustments should I make?”
The AI explained it to Logan. Logan told it he needed a simpler explanation. That prompted another matrix reconfiguration. Logan got a simpler explanation. Not by much, but enough to understand what the hell the hardware was talking about.
And with that Logan shrugged and used another F-tier Crystal and demanded the javelin to be straighter by 4.3 millimeters and shifting 4% of its thickness into length. It shifted in his hands, apparently taking on the proportions Logan had asked for.
[Level up!]
[Class options available]