"The wise know that a burden shared is a burden halved. Seeking others to help is not weakness, but a cunning way to make the road easier. And if those who help happen to have a talent for relieving the rich of their burdens? Well, you’ve chosen your companions well." — The Tao of Idleness, Book 3, Verse 14.

The scroll Wanker had given me felt heavier in my hand than it had any right to. I tried to let it drop to the floor, but it pinged immediately back into my grasp. It took a couple of goes, but I managed to persuade it to stay in my inventory, where it buzzed away in an entirely menacing manner: basically the persistent cold caller from hell. In under forty-eight hours, I needed to decide if I was going to sell my soul to the Empire or risk facing the wrath of both sides of a war I didn't really know anything about. And that little deadline was on the exact same countdown as I had to get Lia back to Eldhaven to complete our Gambler’s Debt quest. Which, in turn, meant I needed the Medical Hut upgraded to Level 2 to start healing her within that timeline, too. Which meant . . . which meant . . . which meant.

Fuck me. How did a Freeloader end up with this sort of transparently epic ‘to-do’ list? I was beginning to look back at being chased by a wolf as a restful period of benign relaxation. All Frodo had to do was walk a fucking ring up a mountain.

I turned back to the Well, positioned in the centre of the clearing around which I was building my village, and gave it a cold, hard stare: this thing was obviously King MacGuffin of all of MacGuffin Town. The alchemist we had been sent to murder had set up shop here; the veil between the realms – whatever that meant – was thinner here because of the fucking thing; I could exchange my HP for various buffs via it; and my village manifestly wanted to grow up around it. Cool beans. Look at me and my free and easy access to unimaginable power. However, none of that was going to matter if two fucking armies rolled in and blitzed me down to my constituent pixels.

Idle Gains: +1 Wood +1 Stone +1 Food.

Ah, so at least my new worker was good for something! I mean, it was only another 0.5 of each resource I desperately needed in order to get this stalling show on the road - thanks again, unexpected debuff! You're really the star of this shitty show, aren't you - but every little helped. Nevertheless, that slow and steady uptick in my stream of resources still wasn’t enough to soothe my increasingly frayed nerves. To get things to where I needed them to be, I needed an awful lot more—more stone, more food, more . . . well, everything. I had to find some way to get Lazytown properly fortified, but without supplies, I wasn’t going to be getting anywhere especially fast. And the only way that was likely to happen? Either ‘pledge myself to the Empire’ – and fuck that with a sharp stick - or somehow figure out a way to scrounge up enough resources to keep going on my own. Neither option felt like a winner.

“Damn it, Lia,” I said, wandering back over to my Medical Hut. “This feels like the sort of thing a Level 15 Warrior would probably have some insight into!” Her slow, steady breathing was, sadly, her only reply. If I didn’t do something soon, she might wake up to find there wasn’t a village left to defend.

Another notification popped up in front of me.

Idle Gains: +5 Stone +3 Wood +2 Food. (Developmental Bonus)

I blinked. Well, that was more than usual. Why? What had happened? I tapped into the village interface, scrolling through the options, trying to make sense of the change. However, nothing seemed to be all that different. The Village Hall still wasn’t done – although that was creeping towards completion. My 500% debuff was still running. Nope. Couldn’t see any reason for the sudden largesse.

Ah, no. There it is—there’s a new option available under the worker tab: Assign Builder.

“Builder?” I said to no one in particular, clicking on the option. The moment I did so, one of the pixelated figures fumbling about in my nascent Village Hall shimmered, glowing faintly gold as its form began to morph. In no time at all, my once simple worker now had a tool belt around its waist, a yellow hard hat and a pencil behind the ear of its blocky yellow face.

Builder assigned.

Construction speed increased by 10%.

I watched as the Builder Pixel - Bob. I'm absolutely going to be calling him Bob - moved immediately towards the middle of the schematic of the Village Hall and started being especially industrious, particularly when it came to ordering the default Pixel Worker around. Ah, so Bob was management. I quickly checked out the Village Hall construction bar and it was definitely moving a bit faster to completion than previously. Just two hours to go now. Okay, so that little upgrade was worth it, then. The thing is, I couldn’t see what had happened to trigger the Builder option, and it was greyed out now. It did suggest, though, that I would be able to specialise my workers from the ‘default’ to something else. Presumably, the dude cutting down trees could become a Woodcutter or something like that?

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I’d half expected that option to appear as soon as I thought it. That was how my Luck worked in this place, wasn’t it? But, no. Not on this occasion. Bugger.

Two hours until I had a Village Hall. Good stuff. That looked like it would come with some new options for me to play with – even if it didn’t on its own meet the prerequisites I needed to drop the crappy debuff. I was beginning to suspect I’d need to have both the two remaining ‘basic’ buildings to be able to level up the Medical Hut.

Storage Shed: Requires 50 Stone 30 Wood.

Hunter’s Lodge: Requires 60 Wood 40 Stone.

Ug.

I didn’t have anything close to enough resources for either. Let alone both. Still, Bob felt like it was a step in the right direction. But I couldn’t shake the sense of doom hovering over me. Every minute that passed, I was reminded that the Empire was waiting for my answer. And the Rebellion outriders - was that what Wanker had called them? - were on the way.

Reputation:

Empire: Neutral

Rebellion: Belligerent

How had I ended up in the middle of this mess? I was a slacker, not some sort of political mastermind. And now, I was supposed to choose sides in a war I didn’t even understand. My self-pitying moppy train, though, was derailed by the faint sound of footsteps approaching. I spun around, half expecting another messenger or a pixelated figure coming to deliver some cryptic message. Instead, though. it was a small group of villagers. Real people, not pixelated workers.

They were looking at me nervously, their eyes flicking between me and the Well. One of them, an older man with an ugly scar running down the whole lefthand side of his face, cleared his throat and stepped forward.

“We got a notification about a village being established around these parts,” he said. I could be wrong, but there was more than a trace of a Nottinghamshire accent in his speech. “We’ve been travelling through the woods, staying hidden from all the soldiers. But thought we’d come and have a look what was what.”

I cocked my head, trying to process what he was saying. “You’ve been hiding from the Empire?”

“And the Rebellion. We’ve got no love for either of them.”

That was interesting. From what I’d seen of both parties thus far, I wasn’t exactly keen myself. When you were being offered the wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to choose between hitching your wagon to the Creepy Wolf or the Grinning Skull, I could imagine other options being available being pretty attractive. Even if that option was a Medical Hut and a half-built Village Hall . . .

“Well, it’s early days right now, I’m afraid. But soon," I slapped the roof of my Village Hall, "this bad boy can fit so much RTS fun in it."

The man with the scar didn't react to my attempted meme, and I was once more struck by the sense that when I said things that didn't compute in this world, the system just made it sound like something else. “Well, we don’t want to tangle with either side in the war, and we've increasingly got nowhere else to be. Hard to make a living amongst the trees, if you get what I'm saying.”

I did. A neutral village. Somewhere for people who didn’t want to be involved with either the Empire or the Rebellion. The attraction was clear. “Look,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. “I don't want to sell you a bill of goods here. I’m not exactly running a Centre Parcs, and I’ve got a massive debuff running right now. I'm going to level with you: I have no idea how to get this place properly going. Also, in the cause of full and frank open transparency, both sides are breathing down my neck, so I don't think this is likely to be much of a refuge.”

“We can help with your set-up,” the man said. “We know how to survive in these woods. All of us can gather food, hunt, and build. Whatever you need, really. All we need is a place to call home that doesn’t owe allegiance to the Emperor or the fucking Rebellion.”

I glanced back at the Medical Hut, where Lia lay, unconscious and unaware of the choice I was preparing to make. She was absolutely on the side of the Empire – even if I sensed she wasn’t exactly ecstatic about it. The smart play was to lean into being the Rogue of Eldhaven, pledge Lazytown to the Empire and figure all this out later. Tomorrow’s problems were always much easier to deal with than today’s. A bit of time and space to figure out my position in this new world would be welcome. Everything had been going at a million miles an hour and, for a slacker, that was very much not my speed. On the other hand, though, there were some real people here – actual, live, breathing people - looking to me for help. And I didn’t know how to tell them I was absolutely the last person in the world they should be seeking to rely on.

“Okay. You’re on,” I found myself saying, watching as the small group clustered behind Scar pretty much sagged in relief. “But I have to tell you, we’re going to be bang up against it.”

“I think you’ll find,” the group’s leader said, grinning widely, “that when the chips are down, we’re a pretty useful little band of merry souls to have around.”

Idle Gains: +1 Hope.

I wondered what he meant by that.