It really was amazing how much could be accomplished without verbal communication. By the time Sarah finished her bowl of stew, her eyelids were heavy and her body felt sluggish. With only a few simple gestures, she managed to communicate her need to her hosts. Now that they had established her as friend, not foe, the farmer and his children seemed excited to have a guest, and eager to take care of her.
Sarah found herself led through a door in the wall next to her padded bench (how had she missed that before?) into a stairwell. The stairs ran along the end of the house, starting at the front and ending at the back.
Climbing those stairs was not fun, and her body – especially her left leg – protested every step. If it weren’t for the children urging her along, with their sweet, encouraging little faces, she might have just sat down and cried.
When she finally reached the second floor, she found the layout only slightly more complex than the ground floor. At the top of the stairs was a privy. Judging by its position relative to the walls of the house, Sarah suspected it stuck off the side of the building, probably to facilitate, um…disposal.
If one turned left from the stairs, instead of entering the facilities, one entered a hallway. The hallway gave access to two rooms, both of which were bedrooms, one for the farmer and one for the children. With expansive gestures and a bit of show-and-tell, the family made it clear that Sarah would be sleeping in the boy’s bed while he bunked with his father.
It was at this point, as Sarah swayed with exhaustion in the hallway, waiting for her hosts to trundle back and forth with armloads of bedding, that things began to get a bit…strange. Her thoughts were wandering, which wasn’t always a good thing at the best of times, and when she was exhausted, well...
You see, she couldn’t decide if the hallway – which ran along the back edge of the house in a line perpendicular to the stairs – was running the length of the house, or the width. Because, side-to-side was width, right? Just like front-to-back was length. Except that would mean this house was wider than it was long, and since the longer part should be the “length”, that made front-to-back in this house width, and side-to-side length…right? Right!?!
Sarah groaned and furrowed her brow, for once wishing her brain weren’t quite so…active.
“Length and width? the main part of her mind asked. “Does that actually matter right now? Is it even remotely important?”
“Yes!” shouted the petulant, niggling, little part of her mind that always had something to say. “Everything matters! Everything is important! Knowledge is king! No trivia is useless, no information is…”
The diatribe continued as the main part of her mind sputtered in impotent exasperation. A third part of her mind – a slightly more rational subset of the “Sarah Overmeyer gestalt” – stepped gracefully to the fore to posit the theory that everything they had been through (“they” being Sarah and her multiple trains of thought), when coupled with her physical form’s state of injury and extreme exhaustion, might be giving birth to the occasional mild hallucination.
Little-Miss-Know-It-All-Sarah nattered excitedly over that suggestion and Prime-Sarah acknowledged that Rational-Sarah made a very good argument. Fortunately, it wasn’t too much longer before the host body of the “Sarah Overmeyer gestalt” found itself tucked into a comfortable (if slightly small) bed, in a cozy little bedroom. In no time at all, the many facets of the human named Sarah melded back into one as she drifted off into a deep and dreamless slumber.
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When Sarah woke, it was with a confused but surprisingly clear mind. Surprisingly because she remembered what she’d been thinking before she fell asleep…well, she remembered some of it…something about a gestalt?...and in the cold, hard light of day…well, the warm, bright light of day…in the light of day streaming through the bedroom window, Sarah was finally lucid enough to recognize her thought processes of the night before as having been worthy of someone a few pickles shy of a jar…and she was surprised and grateful to realize that her temporary insanity had been just that…temporary.
She also found it extremely confusing; yes, she’d been tired, but seriously? It had been one day…a long alien day, but still one day, right? She’d pulled all-nighters before – what high school or college student hadn’t? – and she’d never had a reaction like that before, not even the one time she went for three days straight without sleep during final exams week (and yes, that was on her list of poor life choices to never repeat).
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But hang on, this wasn’t even her real body; her physical body was safely in some kind of stasis pod-thing, while her mind lived in this virtual reality digital body…which meant, technically, that her real body had been asleep this whole time, so her fatigue had all been of the mental sort…and if she couldn’t handle a single day without spinning out…oh, but it hadn’t just been a single day, had it?
How long had she spent in the empty whiteness, and then the featureless blackness, and finally the timeless greyness, in which she had spent a very long time pondering Skills and their combination potential…all before being dropped straight into the tutorial in the middle of a forest road and beginning her “single alien day”?
Okay, okay, fair enough, she had been “awake” for a seriously impressive stretch by the time last night had rolled around. The blip of craziness made a bit more sense now, and she felt relieved that it was unlikely to repeat itself…probably…hmm…let’s just say a good night’s sleep was going to be high on each day’s priority list for the foreseeable future.
Speaking of a good night’s sleep…Sarah yawned lazily, not so much because she needed to, more that it just seemed the thing to do. She looked around the room and realized the little girl was nowhere to be seen and the small bed on the far side of the room was tidily made. Okay, so she’d slept in a bit, not surprising considering how tired she had been.
Now that she was paying attention, Sarah couldn’t hear any noises from downstairs, but the trilling voices of her three hosts were drifting faintly in through the window, so the farming family was probably outside doing morning chores. And then Sarah noticed that the other thing flowing through the window – the light – had no angle to it, meaning the sun was already high in the sky, meaning she’d slept clear through the morning and possibly into early afternoon. Oops.
Nice of the farmer and his kids to let her sleep, she thought, but now she should get up, use the privy, and see if she could figure out her next meal. Maybe she could scavenge something from the fields or the edge of the forest? She refused to assume her new friends would provide for her needs (her impressively real-feeling needs) just because this was virtual reality. The System messages had made it clear; this tutorial would be mimicking real life, and Sarah’s parents had taught her well: be kind and generous to those one meets, and in turn, accept kindness with grace, and generosity with sincere gratitude, but never assume one is entitled to that which belongs to another, and never take advantage.
Maybe she could do some simple farm work in exchange for food; something that didn’t require any actual farmer-type knowledge or skills, since she was fresh out of those. Or maybe…she still had the [Mushroom] and the [Horned Fox] corpse in her [Storage]. [Keen Eye] had pointed out both of them as being valuable; were they valuable enough to buy her a few days of room and board? Would the farmer even be willing to take them in trade?
Good questions all and she would get answers for them soon. First, however, there was something that needed to be dealt with, something that had been nagging at her since the moment she woke up: a blue dot in the bottom left corner of her vision.
It didn’t move, or pulse, or blink; it just stayed there, in the exact same spot, no matter where she looked…which was how she knew it wasn’t something in the room with her. The dot was the same bright, almost fluorescent, blue colour the System used for menu and notification screens. If it weren’t for that – and her extensive experience with the LitRPG genre, Sarah might have revisited the insanity theory. Instead, she was intrigued, but she hesitated.
This would be her first proper System notification and it warranted a little ceremony. Okay, so, not really her first first – there were those Skill-related notifications that popped up the day before – but this one was her first start-of-day notification and that felt different, more…fundamental, so…ceremony.
Except…ceremony?...while lying in an alien kid’s borrowed bed, with a body covered in scrapes and bruises, a bladder nearing capacity, and a stomach running on empty? Eh, just get it over with, Sarah told herself. So she did.
She focused her attention on the small blue dot and it blossomed into a full System screen.
Congratulations! By pushing yourself well beyond your limits – and surviving the experience – you have earned a point in Endurance.
*Note: Unlike Attribute points that are awarded upon levelling up, or for other such achievements, earned points do not require contact with a Town Monument for distribution, nor can you choose to which Attribute they will be applied.
With a mental flex, Sarah dismissed the notification and the screen folded away into nothing in that strange origami-like fashion.
Well now, Sarah thought as she slowly sat up and reached for the belt and boots someone had thoughtfully removed the night before. It’s not a level-up, I guess I’ll need a class for that, but it’s still a satisfying bit of progression to start the day on. Let’s see what else I can do.