The trip back against the current was monotonous, and I was constantly looking for a distraction on the boat ride. I managed to find a few ways to keep myself occupied. Kenny’s canoe ended up not looking like a canoe at all to me. He’d taken two tree trunks and hollowed them mostly out, then tied a frame of poles between them. It almost looked like some kind of outrigger, but it kept all three of them afloat which was pretty impressive when you considered just how big Kenny really was. He spent the entire trip either rowing or carving on his little boat, constantly improving the shape of the exterior and the thickness of the walls. I amused myself for a while pointing out lines I thought were crooked or spots he missed. Debbie ended up splashing me with river water and telling me to knock it off, but it had been fun for a while.

I took another go at Tim’s book, and tried to slow down and pick out details this time. The map was still the most useful part in my opinion and I kept going over the notes and symbols until I could practically see the map with my eyes closed.

I spent time just talking to Debbie about random stuff we could do to improve life around the keep. There wasn’t anything important discussed really. I showed her the door knob I’d gotten for it and we handed out keys. She showed me a big coil of what looked like PEX with a little plastic doohickey on the end.

“It’s a mana powered pump and water line. I’m pretty sure I’ve got enough to reach the keep from the lake, I figured indoor plumbing was a pretty high priority. This is just the first step.”

I thought about the amount of head pressure you’d have to generate to move water through that small a pipe over that distance and the pump she was holding that was the size of a baseball. It was a magic pump though, so I didn’t say anything until we had a chance to test it out. Throughout our conversation there was a kind of low level flirtation hovering in the background, but for the most part, it was just comfortable.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

I also talked farming with John, and while he didn’t seem too thrilled with some of my choices, overall he was happy with what I’d got. He claimed llamas were too small to ride which didn’t match up with what I remembered from internet memes, but was probably correct. He also said they used to use them to pull carts and stuff back in South America so we’d probably be able to train them to plow. The big kicker was when he told me the guineas had been a waste of XP.

“Why do you say that? You can eat the eggs right?”

“They’re all gonna die, Jack. What do guinea hens eat?”

“I don’t know, bugs and stuff.”

“You noticed any mosquitos or flies or any of that annoying stuff since we stepped out of that weird green door?”

“Well no, but I thought we’d gotten lucky. No humans here before us so they don’t recognize us as food.”

“I don’t think they’re here at all, Jack.”

“No way. You saying there are zero bugs here? Nature doesn’t work like that.”

“What about this whole ball of wax seems natural to you? I get in the real world bugs fill a necessary niche in an ecosystem. I don’t know what does the pollination here, and breaks down dead things and all that good stuff, but I can’t remember seeing a single bug. LIving in the woods with sketchy sanitation, does that seem likely to you? Think of the numbers of predators we’ve seen and how close together they live. No way this a functional ecosystem.” He spread his arms in an expansive gesture taking in all of the countryside, “Something we aren’t seeing is manipulating all this.”

His argument was convincing but it depressed me. I didn’t like to think about the implications of being stuck in a game. It was easier to just treat everything like it was real and go from there. The problem with that was, when something like this slipped through and hit me, it was a little more jarring. I let my boat drift away from his and focused on filing at my antler sword for a while.

We pointed out Venus Man Traps to the people who hadn’t seen them before when we passed the island, and on the morning of the second day, Allison swore she’d seen another Hell Moose on the south side of the river. Everyone had been in a hurry to get back to the keep, and we’d pushed it late the first night and left early in the morning so it wasn’t quite mid-day yet when we came in sight of the falls. Debbie waived her hand to get the new people’s attention and then made a sweeping gesture indicating everything north of the falls.

“Welcome home, ladies and gentlemen.”