Chapter 4:

After only an hour's work Frank had managed to move most of the remains of his robots into the most sturdy looking house, and was sitting on one of the most comfortable looking rocks with a long thin piece of metal in his hands. He thought it may have been one of the antennae from one of his earliest creations.

He glanced up at his Mana and saw that he had recovered 6 Mana points, and he figured he would see what he could do. Picking up another piece of metal about palm sized and rested it against another piece resting between his feet.

’Intent, energy and material. He thought to himself. Focussing his mind he thought of his welder from home. ’Intense arcing heat, melding material, joining together. [Mana Infusion]’

[Mana -1 :5]

Franks hand lit up with a white glow, which seeped into the thin metal rod and coalesced at the tip he was hovering near the meeting point of the two pieces of metal. The air filled with the familiar sparking and burning noise of welding. At the same moment Franks eyes were blinded by the bright light.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck” Frank exclaimed dropping his makeshit tools and rubbing at his eyes. Despite being temporarily blinded Frank could still see the icon and Mana count floating at the upper corners of his vision. He noticed the one Mana point expenditure, as his vision slowly came back, still with big splotches of white and black as his retinas recovered.

“Eye protection.” Frank muttered to himself. “How am I going to weld without eye protection?” While he waited for his vision to recover he decided that he should check out his menu. He decided it was probably time to look at his Physical Skill shop and see what the system would offer him.

[Physical Skills:]

[(Skills for which you lack the Prerequisites for will not be shown)]

[Head shot - Passive (1 Physical Point )]

[Strike 2 Physical Points]

[Graceful Balance 2 Physical Points]

[Adaptive Lenses 3 Physical Points]

Scanning through the options Frank wondered if there were any details or anything given. However no matter how he thought or focussed his sight there were no changes. *’Perfect, loot box Skills. Well I guess I will have to make a choice, and not going to lie, Adaptive Lenses sounds like it might be just what I need for welding, if I am really lucky.’

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Once again the system seemed to be able to sense that he had made his decision and redeemed Adaptive Lenses.

[Skill Purchased: Adaptive Lenses. (3 Physical Points)]

Since the system did not seem to which to award him any additional Skills or anything, Frank decided that he should check out the description of Adaptive Lenses.

[Skill Details: Adaptive Lenses.]

[This is a toggleable passive skill. When active, anything that effects the eyes, environmental or otherwise, will be adapted to by Mana lenses over the top of your eyes. Caution should be used, as these lenses will persist for 10 seconds unless the triggering stimulus re-orccurs. There is no way to dispel these lenses early, even deactivation of the Skill will leave the lenses in place.]

[Costs 1 Mana every 10 minutes]

‘1 Mana every 10 minutes.’ Looking up at his Mana counter, he wondered how much Mana he actually regenerated. A moment later his Mana counter expanded out from the corner of his view to dominate his vision just like the other menu.

[Mana: 6/10]

[Regen rate: 0.2* Mana/Minute]

As he wondered what the asterix next to the regen rate meant, another sub-menu opened.

[All values are rounded to 1 decimal place. Regeneration rate can be toggled into the following timescales:]

[Seconds]

[Minutes]

[Hours]

[Days]

Flicking through Frank learned that at the moment he seemed to regenerate Mana at a rate of 1 every 10 minutes. Which meant he could keep Adaptive Lenses active as long as he pleased. Which meant it was time to get to work.

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Frank had soon learned that he was actually not able to keep the Lenses active constantly because he had to spend a Mana to engage his ‘welding rod’. After experimentation he had estimated that the welding rod would stay active for about 5 minutes for 1 Mana, so he was able to mostly keep active, with the occasional break for his Mana to regenerate, which was probably for the best as it allowed him to stretch his back and uncramp his hands.

He had focussed on shoring up his living situation to begin with. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he wanted somewhere that had a chance to be safe to stay so he used some of the larger pieces of metal to build a loose cage over where he figured he would sleep. He figured that if any of the walls did decide to collapse then the cage would stop the rocks making up the walls from crushing him, and should delay or even outright stop anything that might try to attack him.

He estimated that he had been working for about 3 hours by that point, and the sun was just a little past its highest point. He had not been disturbed by any more creatures, but he was now starting to get hungry. And he really did not like the idea of trying to eat anything that looked as disgusting as the creatures he had killed, nor something that the system had labelled as ‘Plagued’. It was time to explore and look for food.

Frank had deactivated his Lenses before leaving, allowing his vision to return, since he was effectively blinded by them while welding. So he was roughly able to track the time by watching his Mana tick up. He also made sure to track where he was going, even moving some rocks about as he moved to make his path back more obvious to him, just in case he got into another fight and lost track of where he had come from. So it was that almost an hour later with a decent stock of Mana that he came across something new.

Rounding a corner Frank saw the first building he had come across that was not dilapidated. Standing higher than the rest at 4 levels where none of the others had been more than 2 high.

There was also smoke coming from the chimney.