Tsun stretched her hands behind her head in clarity above the aquaplanet, angling her body parts to control her fall. She half backflipped for one last high peek into the vast virtual space. There were no distant galaxies or constellations, she glimpsed only the shine of a distant drifting scrap heap. The long shadow of night on Ice V was pushed on by a single rising star, and Tsun was falling precisely onto the chasm between night and light.
She could make out a giant storm with a few sparse dull red dots surrounded by a calmer atmosphere. She targeted one of the larger ones in sight.
As she broke the blue sky further, from the dot emerged a barren island surrounded by the swirling white eddies of an icy froth.
Her eyes dilated as she calculated the distance remaining.
2000 meters
1000...
She planned to stoically dive headfirst into the water on impact, but as she approached the surface, a warm upward draft began to cushion her fall. Land it is.
400… 200… 100… 50…
Crunch.
Tsun instinctively forward rolled as she touched down, popping upwards with a brilliantly executed motion.
“Fortunately, I don’t appear to have taken any fall damage,” she cheered, pleased that the self-awareness of her character’s locomotion was well tuned.
“Wasn’t I supposed to have selected creative mode? This place doesn’t look very playful to me,” she frowned at the spawn zone. The terrain was desolated clay, with patches of soft sand and rocky outcroppings. A few meager twigs grew from impoverished homes in the clay. She surveyed the island to get her bearings. It was ~40 meters at its longest length, and was shaped like an ‘L’ perceived through the hazy gaze of a convolutional neural network.
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The warm breeze began to nip at her exposed skin: her character was not equipped with any default clothing.
"Indecent," she shook her head at the naturist mechanic, "I’m going to have to craft my own clothes," she playfully sobbed in a high pitched drama, crossing her arms and crouching ever slightly.
“I suppose I’d better go harvest some materials.”
She walked over to one of the richer clay areas, and began to pry up handfuls of earth.
The ground was much softer than the winter hardened adversary she had anticipated, and she soon found herself souped in a pleasant primordial dough. As she extracted the clay it clumped up into item drops.
Item Discovered: CLAY.
CLAY +5
Inventory 2.5/100
“I wonder if I can make anything with this clay, that'd be nice.” Tsun cracked her knuckles, then rubbed her palms together at the challenge.
She tried crafting a primitive bowl, but the clay would not cooperate: it morphed back into its original shape after a few seconds of displacement.
“Maybe I need to be a little more intentional.” She closed her eyes and imagined a perfect bowl: not too large, but deep enough to hold a generous helping of liquid.
Her eyes peeked into slits; Tsun sculpted the clay into a rough approximation of a bowl. She pressed her lips against the clay and blew gently. It fluctuated in saturation slightly at the touch of her lips, becoming more vivid.
The clay was warm, soft, and inviting. Tsun blushed, embarrassed. "Was this.. interpersonal attraction? For a crafting material, of all things?"
The clay promptly snapped back into its standard drop geometry.
"Bricked! What's wrong with this clay," Tsun cursed with a futuristic lingo. Her consciousness resumed a dead eyed agent-like status, the clarity in her mind was more precise than any machine.
“No matter.” She was not having it with this unrequited relationship. “Time to analyze the flora on this island.”
She emerged from her clay bath and hobbled to a twig a few meters distant. On closer inspection, it was modestly metallic: a bending dull silver with concentric outlines of pearl erosion swaying bashfully in the breeze.
Tsun remorselessly reached to uproot it. The twig was surprisingly flexible, but it refused to be pried up from the surface. She scooped out material around the base to unveil bulbous roots interweaving a curious mineral underneath. She folded her fingers pi/2 radians into rodent-like claws and burrowed out the circumference.
BENDY_TWIG +1
COMMON_ORE +1
Inventory 5.5/100
“Resources!” Tsun imagined spinning a stubby clay dagger on the tip of her finger.
{-1 COMMON_ORE, -5 CLAY}
Item Crafted
+1 CLAY_PROPINQUITY
“Huh?”