I pulled out what I thought was the padlock key from the yellow envelope as I approached the locked door to the shed. It felt a little like a misnomer to just call it a shed, because it was pretty large. Marlene had said that there was only one pickup truck that Grandpa Joe had left behind for me, but this garage or shed or whatever I was going to call it looked big enough to hold at least two or three different vehicles.

I unlocked the padlock and removed the heavy iron chain holding the doors in place. I pushed them open and saw an absolute mess in front of me. It looked like my grandpa had just used this place as a dumping ground for the last twenty years or so. There was a massive car shaped blob in the middle of the shed, but it was covered with a thick black tarp. It conformed to the contours of the car though, so this covering had been custom made for it. At least he tried to keep the elements off the car, which was more than I could say for everything else that was strewn about the place.

In amongst the chaos there were a couple of islands of organization. Off to one side of the car was a meticulously arranged set of tools hanging from the wall. It had everything from screwdrivers to hammers, all the way through to large saws and axes. Some of the metal looked a little rusty but they looked functional enough.

To the left of the car was another well organized section of the shed which held all of the farming implements that I would need in the days to come. I saw a hoe, a scythe, a few different shovels, a pickaxe, and a bunch of other tools that I didn't immediately recognize. I didn't have a time piece or anything like that to tell exactly what time it was, but it couldn’t have been long since I'd arrived in town at 8:00 o'clock. I still had plenty of time to do what needed to be done today.

First thing first, I needed to make sure that I'd be able to drive that truck out of here when I needed to. I almost went to grab the scythe to start with, but there was no point in clearing the grass if the car didn't run. So instead, I slipped the black covering off the truck and was surprised to see a pickup truck of a completely unknown make and model.

It was called a Matsuda Hauler, and it was a rust bucket. There were literal holes in the body of the car, and I didn't like my chances at the car having power steering, let alone an AI-driven self-piloting function. No, this whole world was going to be an analog experience whether I liked it or not.

I slipped into the driver's seat and slotted the key into the ignition. I turned it, and the engine sputtered once, twice, then finally turned over and started chugging along on the third try. The whole car shook even while we were standing still. It rattled with a deep sickness that sounded like it was going to be very expensive to fix.

But this was my only transport in this world, and I would need to make it work. In a pinch I probably could walk the distance from the farm all the way into town, but I didn't really want to do that if I could help it. It was already going to be enough hard work getting the farm back up and running.

Generally in farming simulator games, the character you play as has some kind of energy meter. To my surprise, the moment I thought about the existence of an energy meter, one appeared in my view. It wasn't large, but it was full. The energy meter itself was blue, which was a little surprising. Normally a full meter, in video game language, would be green. Then when you hit a certain threshold where you're in danger of passing out that color would switch to orange or red. You know, green means good, red means bad? It didn't have any kind of numerical indication of the amount of energy I had remaining, but a full bar is a full bar.

There wasn't a lot of gas left in the Hauler, the gauge was sitting at just under a quarter of a tank. That would be enough to get me into town for sure, but I'd probably need to put a little bit more gas in just to make sure I could still get around.

I really wanted to go for a good drive around Yuca Valley myself so I could really get to know my new home. But until I got the car checked out by Carl the mechanic, I didn't really want to risk breaking down on the side of the road somewhere and having no idea of how to get back to town.

I switched the car engine off, satisfied that as long as I could get it out of the farm, I would be able to get back to town in one piece. But there was the matter of all the things stopping me from even being able to drive the car down the driveway.

If I was applying farming simulator logic to this new world, then I would need a few different tools to break up all of the obstacles in my way. I'd need a pickaxe to get rid of the stones, an axe to chop the fallen tree up and get it out of the way, and I'd need some kind of cutting implement to clean up all of the grass and weeds. The scythe would do for that, but I did notice something else in the stack of tools that I hadn't noticed before.

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There was a sword sitting in a scabbard to the back of all the farming tools. When I first arrived here, I was kind of shocked that it was such a modern kind of world. If I'm being honest I actually was a little disappointed that it wasn't a swords and sorcery kind of world. But maybe I'd been wrong about that. Maybe there was an element of that to this world, I just hadn't been here long enough to see it.

I grabbed the sword and slid the blade out of the scabbard. It was balanced well, and my young muscles swung it about with ease. I made the mistake of running my finger along one edge of the blade and felt a small pinch as the metal sliced my skin open. I recoiled and shook my hand like it had been burnt, then put the finger into my mouth to stop the bleeding.

This sword was no toy. It was battle ready and still sharp. I tied the loop attached to the scabbard to my belt and took the sword with me. I decided to start clearing the weeds and the grass because by the end of it, at least I'd be able to see absolutely every single one of the obstacles along the driveway.

It took me quite a long time to clean up the driveway of weeds and grass. To my surprise, another information panel popped up as I started cutting the weeds down. The information panel showed that the cut grass was a mixture of two different items: plant matter and fiber. The more I cut down, the more plant matter and fiber I could pick up.

I still needed to physically separate the two different components of what I'd chopped down, but it was like my body knew which pieces could be used as fiber and which pieces would be used as the generic kind of plant matter. I didn't understand why this was happening or why it was happening in this way, but there would have to be something in my grandfather's notes that would explain this.

I didn't have a time piece to track how long it actually took but I figured that I'd been at it for at least two or three hours when the whole driveway itself was clear of grass and weeds.

Luckily there was only the one big fallen tree that would be a problem, but there were plenty of other branches that were laying across the road that I had to move out of the way. These branches also had information appear just like the fiber and the plant matter. Some of it was marked as wood, some of it was marked as bark, and each of the items seemed to have some kind of quality indicator.

For example, one of the pieces of wood had been laying there for quite some time and had rotted from the inside out. So while this was still marked as wood, it was marked as junk quality. The quality ratings had to have something to do with what I could use these items for, but that would be something that I would investigate later. Without putting too much thought into it, making stuff with higher quality items generally made life easier than crafting stuff with dodgy items.

Next up I used the axe to chop down the fallen tree and hold it piece by piece off the road. By the time I'd finished cutting the tree down I was sure that it was about midday because the sun was shining high in the sky.

Another similarity between my world and the world here was that there was only one sun in the sky, at least for the moment. I hadn't seen a moon yet, but in my world some days the moon didn't show its face until the sun went down.

I stopped to have some lunch and was exceedingly grateful for the package that Marlene made for me. I hadn't even looked in my grandfather's cupboards for food or anything like that before starting work, but I would have to take stock of anything he left behind before I went shopping the next day.

There was an old-school hand pump just next to the shed which I used to quench my thirst. The water was cool and clean and tasted natural. After a quick rest I kept going with the rocks and shattered as many of them as I could with the pickaxe.

This broke the rocks down into a couple of different things. Most of it was just plain old stone, but broken up into different size categories. I collected stone chips, stones (small), and stones (medium). I divided them all up into piles and stacked them next to the shed.

I was a little bit annoyed at myself for leaving the hardest job until last, but by the time I had finished I'd smashed up a respectable amount of rocks, had plenty of wood that I would be able to use as firewood after the sun went down, and once I knew what I was going to do with all of this plant matter and stuff I'd be able to figure that out too.

By the time I was done I was absolutely wrecked. Muscles in my back and my arms ached with the effort of manual labor. I was never the kind of person who was averse to doing hard work when it was needed, but I was also not the kind of person who would seek that work out when there was a more convenient option to achieve the same outcome.

This probably had a lot to do with the extra weight I carried with me in my other life, and why I'd always been looking for a quick fix to make me feel better, rather than putting in the effort and the long term work to make myself a better person.

I tried to enjoy the feeling of exertion. This was going to be a constant in my life for the foreseeable future, so I would need to get used to it. But I also didn't want to completely overdo it on my first day, so once I'd finished clearing the driveway, I headed back inside so I could spend some quality time with all the things that my grandfather had left behind.

Maybe there was something in that information that would explain this interface that I was experiencing, and how I could best use it.