I glanced up at the town hall clock, which seemed to be visible from pretty much everywhere in town, and it was almost 2 o'clock in the afternoon. The truck would be ready soon, and I still needed to go shopping for some groceries and bedding supplies. Both places I needed to go - The Burrow and a furniture superstore just called Smith's - were in Bazaar Street, just across the intersection from Morning Ritual and Carl's Automotive.

The Burrow really did remind me of a cozy little animal burrow. The lights inside were dim, and all the shelves were made of natural wood stained with a dark varnish. There was a sign on the front that said 'Local Business? Start a business account with us today!' I guess I was a local business, so maybe I should open an account with them too.

I headed inside and was immediately reminded of the boutique delicatessens that you could find in the more upmarket parts of the city I’d lived in. There was a butcher's window in one corner, with all kinds of dried produce and sausages hanging from the ceiling, with plenty of fresh cuts of meat inside a glass case.

Back in the world I came from, the food industry pivoted to more plant-based products as I grew older, but I was a meat eater. In my opinion, there's nothing better than a thick sirloin steak seared medium-rare with a pot of fresh mushroom gravy on the side. Thick-cut fries were a plus, but I'd also settle for steamed fresh vegetables. As I got older, deep fried food sat differently in my stomach and really clogged my guts up.

Everything in this place felt like it was homemade or made by a small business. The sign above the cash registers proclaimed that The Burrow was fiercely independent.

Just as a true badger should be.

Alan Badger was busy serving a line of customers, otherwise I would have introduced myself right away. Alan even had a shock of white hair that stood out against his black hair. He even looked like a badger.

I scooped up a wooden basket and did my shopping. I got enough supplies for a couple of days, but when Grandpa's truck was back in working order, I would come back and do a proper shop. I was in pretty good shape in this body, and if I was going to put in some hard work I’d need lots of energy to keep me going.

My farmer’s insight kept showing the traits and attributes of the kinds of food I picked up. Some foods restored more energy than others, and other foods increase certain attributes. Just like the coffee I’d had at Morning Ritual, the coffee I found here listed boosts to both cognition and speed. I found some protein bars which increased strength and endurance. When I picked up raw ingredients, like fruit, vegetables, and shrink-wrapped trays of freshly butchered meat, it came up with another message.

Ingredients may have enhanced or altered effects when cooked as part of a recipe.

Knowing what effects these food items would have on me certainly did change my attitude towards shopping. Instead of buying things just for the taste, I’d focused on getting foods that I could cook for their effects. It remained to be seen whether they tasted good as well, but experimentation would be key. I couldn’t resist buying some coffee, a coffee plunger, and some chocolate cookies though. I am only human, after all.

I lined up, and Alan seemed to have disappeared somewhere. There was a young pimply-faced young man serving at the check out named Patrick, and I asked him to tell Alan I stopped by. He said that he would, and I kept going.

After I was done at The Burrow I had two bags full of groceries and headed into Smith’s, the furniture superstore. I found myself a medium firmness pillow and a smooth lightweight summer blanket. If we were in spring and heading to summer, I wouldn’t need a big heavy blanket for a few months. And as long as I had something nice and comfy to put between myself and the other scratchy blankets Grandpa Joe already had, I would be okay.

When I got back to Carl’s Automotive, grandpa's old pickup truck was already waiting outside. They’d finished the work, and Jimmy came out to meet me.

“How did you go at the guild? Did you meet old Ben?” Jimmy asked.

“I did, but he didn’t give me a license right away. He said I needed to learn the basics of protecting myself first. Apparently, Lance is going to train me tomorrow?”

Jimmy laughed nervously. “He’s putting you up against Lance? Oh man, you'd better have some ice ready for afterwards. Lance is going to put you through your paces.”

That sounds ominous. “Who’s Lance? Should I be worried?”

“If there’s anyone you want to train you to kill monsters, aside from Ben Ironside himself, it’s Lance. He’s an A-ranked monster hunter, the highest we have here in Yuca Valley. There’s no threat we’ve ever seen that Lance hasn’t been able to kill. But make no mistake, he's a professional, and pretty scary to boot. You’d need to be scary to be able to face down a manticore.”

I knew what a manticore was from all the fantasy that I’d read. It had the body and face of a lion, a huge scorpion tail, and leathery bat wings. Often they were depicted with a mouthful of razor sharp spiny teeth. They were one of those creatures that had a taste for human flesh, and actively hunted humans.

“Are manticores and monsters as dangerous as them common around here?” I asked.

“No, not really. Most of the more dangerous monsters have been killed, and the ones that have been allowed to survive and thrive are the ones that we can use to make things. You’ll probably find some slimes on your farm at some point, because they just roll around everywhere looking for food to absorb. But if you manage to kill some slimes you should be able to collect some of the jelly, and you can use that jelly for lots of different things. We use heat resistant slime gel in the engines to keep them cool. The gel absorbs all the heat, so your engine doesn’t blow up. We replaced the cooling slime in your grandpa’s truck already today. Well, I guess it’s your truck now, isn’t it?”

“I guess it is.”

I suddenly realized that I had assumed that I knew a lot about how this world worked, because on the surface it appeared incredibly similar to the world that I had come from. But if they used heat resistant slime gel in engines as a way of cooling it instead of liquid coolant? Then I had absolutely no idea how everything worked. So I decided to pick Jimmy’s brain.

“Can you just give me a little rundown on how the car works? I’ve never really owned one myself. Like, what makes it go? I’ve always relied on-” I was almost going to say public transport, but I had no idea whether public transport like buses and trains that I used in my old life even existed here. “I usually like to walk everywhere in the city. No need for a car, you know?”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

He looked at me like I was speaking in a different language. “Well, sure. At the center of each engine is a flame core, which we get from killing a monster that has a flame affinity. It’s always burning, always hot, and if we introduce water to the flame core it evaporates into steam, and that steam expands and turns the pistons that are inside the engine. The water comes from four, six, or eight little aqua cores that you harvest from aquatic monsters. Your grandpa’s truck is a C6 because it’s got six cores. Just like the flame cores, some of them are more powerful than others, which is why you’ve got some cars and trucks that are more powerful, and by extension, more expensive. The bigger the core you need, the bigger the monster you need to kill. Monster hunting is serious business and if you manage to get your hands on valuable cores, you can build your own stuff, or you can sell them for big bucks.”

In principle the mechanics of the engine sounded very similar to a combustion engine back in the world I came from. In my world, fuel was injected and ignited using spark plugs, which caused the energy to explode and move pistons. Both engines used a piston system to generate power, even though the materials that went into them were vastly different. I tried to think about just how different this world was if it ran on monster core power instead of fossil fuels.

It sounded like I would need to get a handle on exactly how technology worked in this world if I was going to use it to my advantage. I idly wondered how many different kinds of monster parts were used in the construction of computers like the one Courtney had used at the bank.

“That’s interesting, thanks for explaining that to me,” I said, and Jimmy looked proud as punch. “Should I go and talk to Carl about the bill?”

“Oh yeah, he’s just in his office doing paperwork. He’ll probably be thankful for the distraction. Hey, it was great meeting you today Jackson. I might see you practicing at the guild every now and then. My job’s here, but I usually go there on the weekend to practice my swordsmanship skills.”

“Sounds great, Jimmy. I hope I’ll see you there.”

I headed into the office at the back of the mechanical workshop, noticing that the sedan was still up on the car lift. I really hoped that I hadn’t totally derailed their day, but it looked like half of the engine was sitting on the floor in pieces anyway. I knocked on the door frame and Carl waved me in.

“Hey Jackson, how did you go in town? It’s a nice little place we’ve got here, isn’t it?”

“It really is. As you can see, I’ve got some shopping done and I took Jimmy’s advice and had some breakfast over at Morning Ritual. I tried the eggs royale, and they were amazing.”

“Yeah Darren makes a mean breakfast. Say, did you check out Allie’s performance?”

“Yeah she played while I was there. She was great. She has a real talent, and I think she’s going to go far.”

“Yeah, I’m really proud of my little girl.”

“Wait, she’s your daughter?”

He nodded. “Carl Walker, Allie Walker, that’s us. Strange that we’re called Walker, but I spend most of my time behind the wheel, huh? Anyway, Allie’s music is half the reason why I work overtime and on weekends. The more money we can make here through the shop, the easier it is for her to be able to keep going to lessons.”

“She’s got some amazing songs. Has she ever thought about recording a demo and sending it to some record labels?”

“I have suggested that, but she keeps saying that when she records something, she wants it to be done right. And to do it right, we’re going to need to go into a real recording studio which is expensive. We have one in Zazen Town, and I have made some inquiries, but they're always booked out in advance. And you can only book it by the day. So, we’d need to put away quite a bit of money to do it, and Allie won’t let me pay for it.”

“Oh really? Why is that?”

“She’s proud. She’s the kind of girl who doesn't like accepting help from anyone else unless she has no other choice. And when she has no other choice, she still doesn’t want to accept help from anybody else.” Carl shook his head in bemusement. “She’d rather dwell on it and think about how terrible it is that she can’t do everything herself. Daughters are difficult, Jackson. I think I could have managed a lot easier if I had a son, but that's just not what the spirits had in the cards for me.”

It was interesting to hear Carl talking about spirits. When I read Grandpa Joe’s letter that mentioned harvest spirits and staying on their good sides, I just thought it was a cute little superstitious comment from someone who believed in something that didn’t exist.

Back in the world I had come from, the belief in a higher power had fallen out of popularity as we progressed through the 21st century. After dual pandemics, a growing gap between the rich and the poor, and a world where profits and business earnings seems to be more important than human life tended to drive the faith out of people. When I was younger there were many people of faith, but the older I grew, the more people of my own generation and the generations that came after us just gave up on any kind of organized religion.

In this new world, it was very possible that I would have to face the reality that it actually contained real spirits, and those spirits might actually have an impact on the world around me. It certainly seemed as though Carl believed that the spirits were responsible for bringing him a daughter instead of a son, but I wasn’t quite sure exactly which spirits he meant. Surely not harvest spirits like the ones Grandpa Joe talked about.

“That’s something that I haven’t experienced yet,” I said. There was real pain in my words, because in my previous life I had always regretted not having a family. Some days I thought that even though Caroline and I didn’t work out, and things went all the way bad, there might have been a silver lining if we brought a child or two into the world along the way. At least I would have had something to show for those lost twenty years instead of pain and regret.

Carl looked at me with a strange expression on his face. “Aren’t you a little bit young to be thinking about starting a family? You’ve got your entire life ahead of you, Jackson. There’s a lot of work to get that farm back up and running in your future, and I don’t know if there's going to be room in it for love and family for a while.”

I smiled at Carl, trying really hard to bite my tongue. “The thing about love and family is that nobody’s ever ready for them. When they come along, you make the time and space for them like they’ve always been there. And once your life is full of the love and laughter that only a family can bring, you don't mind the mess.”

“I think you’ve been staring at your belly button a bit too much,” Carl said. “A young man like you shouldn’t be thinking that deeply about things. Lose yourself in some hard work, go out and have some adventures, live life before you let the weight of responsibility crush you down.” He sighed, and the tone of Carl’s voice had shifted, almost like he had his own regrets in his life. Maybe there were things that he always wanted to do but never did.

Were we all just destined to dwell on the things we wished we’d done?

“Oh don’t you worry about that,” I said. “I’m learning how to hunt monsters tomorrow with Lance, so there’s plenty of adventure in my future.”

“Jimmy convinced you to follow in his stupid footsteps, did he?”

“Hey!” Jimmy called out from further in the workshop.

I laughed to myself when I realized that Jimmy must have been listening into our conversation. Of course, he would. I was the mysterious new arrival. Of course a young man like Jimmy would want to get as much gossip as he could.

“Anyway here’s the bill for the repairs,” Carl said as he pushed a piece of paper over to me. It was an old school invoice sheet where all of the itemized repairs were broken down line by line, and each of them costed in a column on the right hand side. The total came to $684.32.

“Well that actually isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.”

“Like I said, always happy to work out a payment plan, but I do owe your Grandpa Joe for helping me out in a tight spot, so we can just work this out on your schedule. But I do need to be paid eventually. I’m not running a charity here.”

From anyone else that last bit might have come off as a rebuke, but Carl was just being honest and straightforward.

“Of course. You know where I live, and now Jimmy’s got me hooked on coffee across the street, so I dare say you’re going to see quite a lot of me.”

Carl laughed at that, and then extended his hand towards me. I took it and shook his hand. He squeezed it firmly but not in a crushing grip. It was nice to see that basic handshake etiquette was the same in this world as the one I had come from. A firm handshake showed mutual respect and acknowledgement. I took the invoice and keys with me and slipped them into my pocket. Then I was back behind the wheel of the Matsuda Hauler and driving back towards Second Chance Farm.