I was on a hike, and I was quickly remembering why I tended to not go on hikes, and why using certain maneuvering cards left my legs feeling like they were made of jam. Mostly because just basic *walking* left my legs feeling like jam.

Okay, to be fair, I was walking up a mountain, and had been for the better part of two hours. But neither the conditions of my suffering, nor the eventual reward at the end, made me feel any better about how much my knees were screaming at me.

It was a couple of days after I’d foiled the mass murder of an entire high school, no one appeared to be on my tail about it, and I was starting to let my paranoia drop. Letting myself relax a bit. Personally, I didn’t much care for the idea of letting the news crews in on the secret of my randomly bestowed and strangely arbitrary magical powers; I found the news to be distasteful at best, and kind of awful at worst. It had been good to see that officer Daniels had survived, though, thanks to the efforts of ‘an unidentified good samaritan’, which left me feeling all warm and glowy inside, both because of the anonymity and also because if fulfilled my desire to build a utilitarian utopia.

I was up here, climbing a hiking trail up one of the Three Sisters mountains and groaning to myself about it every step of the way, for two reasons. Two reasons that were actually kinda just the same reason twice.

See, the arcane-and-semi-inscrutable card game wizard system that I’d been bestowed worked in a slightly weird way. The resource pools that I had access to grew naturally over time, letting me slowly work my way up to casting larger and larger spells. Or, alternately, the multiple copies of [Potential] that I had would let me grow a pool that way. Sometimes. It didn’t always work, which led to a complaint that I’ll come back to. Anyway. The problem was that the growth wasn’t indefinite and ever upward. Every week, every exactly seven days, everything reset.

*Everything*. Pools went back to starting values, persistent card effects ended, cards in hand went back into the deck, everything. It also was then that changes were applied to the deck, if I’d made them. So, swapping in or out cards, or even switching to a different deck. The current timer for this was in about six hours.

As a perk, though, I could trigger this reset at any time. Maybe I just really wanted to make a change to the deck, or wanted to control when the *next* reset would happen. 2 AM on a Sunday was when I planned to do the next one, just because I felt like nothing could possibly go wrong then.

That was probably wishful thinking, but it just seemed like the least likely time to absolutely need to shamanically blow something up.

So with all that in mind, I was out here in the wilderness on a little day trip, because in six hours, I was going to have to be bumped back to square one. And given how recently I seemed to be some kind of lightning rod for bullshit, I wanted to do this while I still had a handful of options.

Which of course comes around to part two of the reason; I had a quest to go to a specific random place, and it was here, and I was gonna do it and claim the reward and maybe stick it into my deck before the reset happened if it looked cool.

Many of the rewards looked cool. That was sort of the point.

Anyway. I call it a quest, but so far, I hadn’t actually gotten any real “quests”. I might at some point, but I’m going to bookmark this thought under that same future complaint. What I had was labeled as a Task, and it was the only one of the current six that I thought I could complete. (Wilds Explorer), go to a random location outside of an urban or suburban area. Easy!

I feel like the system may have limited it to somewhere actually accessible, too, since it was in my state, and only a few hours away by car. Of course, the hike itself didn’t get the car fast travel bonus, but I could handle it.

After I sat down on this rock for ten minutes. Jesus, I’m out of shape.

While I rested, waiting for my legs to regain some function and sipping at my water bottle, I also took the opportunity to take my draw for this tick. The gesture of two fingers out, pulling up toward my face, was becoming almost rote at this point to me; a weird thing to think about, given what I was actually doing and how fantastical it was, but also kinda helpful. I might at some point need to do this instinctively, and getting into good habits early was important.

[Under Cover Of Fortune] was the card I pulled, and instantly cast with a grin. Trading four Spite for one negation of an aggressive act was a *fantastic* deal. This was one of those cards that I always looked forward to redrawing, and cast right away whenever I drew it. It never ran out of time, didn’t suck up extra resources, and if someone tried to do anything hostile at me, they just… got unlucky. Simple as that; made one hostile act *not work*.

Of course, it didn’t work on unintended things. Like, I bet I could still be hit by a car. And sometimes, it burned itself on a person trying to insult me, making them stumble over their words instead of delivering a sick burn. So it had limits, which I’d had to suss out myself.

I stood, taking a deep breath of the clean pine air around me before carrying on. The trail would get me to within about a thousand feet of my goal, and I had a couple more miles left yet, so carrying on before it got dark was important. I felt a little better with my extra layer of protection, however tenuous it might be.

And here we get to that bookmarked complaint. The game was fucking ambiguous as shit.

If I got a new card, it told me almost nothing about what it did. Sometimes, I even had to just go off the name, and guess at the function. Targeting was a nightmare; requiring a lot of specificity, without knowing what details were important all the time. And spells could fizzle out if I screwed up the conditions, the targets, hell, even the costs weren’t always visible to me ahead of time.

Once I *did* learn something, I could reference that information at will, and cards would very helpfully provide “|---|” markers on their various text lines if there was something left to discover. That might *sound* great, but you know what still has one of those markers on it? [Potential]. That card I mentioned earlier that just raises my max resource pools? Yeah, it does that. And also something else. Maybe. How would I know?

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

It’s awful, and I hate it. The thrill of discovery is sweet and rewarding, yes, but often times it felt like I was headbutting a wall with new cards. A wall made of spectral cardboard, instead of brick, but still, unpleasant to ram one’s head into. And this was after only having this for a few weeks! I don’t even know if I’ve unlocked all the actual complexity yet; hell, it was literally only yesterday that I got a second deck.

I would have sighed if I thought I could spare the breath. I should have brought a friend to carry the backpack; woe that I was shortsighted and didn’t actually have any friends in this half of the country.

Still, despite not being an outdoorsy person at all, I seriously appreciate the natural beauty around me. It was the middle of summer, but it had already started to cool down here, and the shade of the trees made beautiful patterns on the ground as light danced between branches. I would have thought somewhere this far away from a road would be quiet, but the forested path sounded like a damn mixtape of nature. Bugs, birds, running water off in the distance, the crackle of leaves and twigs underfoot. All of it was kinda awe inspiring for a normally urban-dwelling couch potato like myself.

Didn’t make the hike any easier, but at least I was enjoying it. And honestly, maybe not having anyone along was for the best; I got to plod along at my own pace and take constant breaks, without having to worry about someone else wanting to keep up a steady pace.

Also there was no one around to laugh when I accidentally almost stepped on a skunk.

Aaaaaand there went [Under Cover Of Fortune]. And also the skunk, darting away into the patches of greenery nearby. “Holy shit” I muttered, leaning on a tree to try to get my heart to stop racing. The skunk may have been too startled or too magicked to nail me with it’s spray, but that was still a bit of a jump scare.

I took the opportunity to take another break, although this time pretending that I was doing it for a reason. Checking the map, I saw I was maybe another ten minutes of walking to get to where I was going to have to leave the trail. Looking after the skunk to make sure it wasn’t following me, I saw nothing but a layer of pine needles, and a thick patch of some kind of fruit bush.

That actually made me pause. This was a good opportunity to test out another card limitation, as long as I was flush with Curiosity, and had a draw coming up anyway.

Open my Hand up, fanning out an invisible sheaf of cards in front of me. Snag [Fact Finder] out of it, and toss it out into the world. Nudge it mentally at the berry bush. Yes, I know it’s not a legal subject, but I think it’s a legal target. It’s science, basic ecological knowledge. Probably in a thousand books. Just tell me what that plant is.

Reality rippled and then snapped back to normal. And just like that, I had a Wikipedia entry for the Oregon Grape in my head. The weird thing about [Fact Finder], when it worked, was that it gave me a detailed report, and it gave it to me in a form that wasn’t actually a memory. It felt super passive-aggressive, but I actually had to mentally scan through the information about how I could eat those, but probably wouldn’t like taste, and that they make good jam. Because if I didn’t, then in about a minute, the information would just… fade out. And I’d be left not actually knowing what I’d known a second ago, unless I’d studied it.

It was a weird effect, but it was reasonably flexible, and often just kind of satisfied my own personal curiosity. Especially here, where cell phone service was a whispered myth, and actual Wikipedia wasn’t accessible. And now, I’d added one more legal target to the list. Though, in typical fashion, the system told me only that it was able to glean information about ‘ecological’ topics, which was… broad. And also maybe not entirely accurate. Yet.

Twenty minutes of steady footfalls, and one pointless draw of [Incense], later, I found myself hesitantly stepping off the worn dirt trail, and onto a bed of pine needles and rocks. I had no GPS coordinates, just a Task that helpfully informed me of my absolute distance from the location. And that location involved picking my way through wads of spiny-leaved bushes, and up over rocky ledges that I couldn’t always find sloped paths around.

By the time I reached my destination, my water bottle had been empty for a while, I’d gotten roughly half the mountain’s worth of dirt in my shoe, and I was really quite ready to get back to my car and go home. And I’d nearly pissed myself, while literally already pissing myself, when a deer the size of a small truck stepped casually out from behind a tree and made unassuming and arrogant eye contact with me. That had been both terrifying, *and* awkward; especially for the kind of person who locks the bathroom door when I’m alone at home.

And then, I stepped around one last rock outcropping, studiously avoiding being near it in case it was full of snakes or some bullshit, and saw my destination.

It’s actually quite weird to see a literal quest marker in real life, as a heads up. It wasn’t a physical image, so much as it was that I understood, explicitly, that this was a point I had to be at in order to accomplish the (Wilds Explorer) Task. It was kind of like a ring, kind of like a ball, totally without color or shape, and giving me a headache entirely without the aid of the [Headache] Card I kept in my Deck to keep it at the minimum size.

So, I did what comes naturally to a belligerent wizard, walked over, and poked it.

And that was it. It vanished. I opened up my menu, which I planned on calling a spellbook in my head whenever I could remember to be a bit cooler, and pulled up the Tasks tab. One (Wilds Explorer) complete, thank you very much.

One last note on this task, and the reason I’d gone for this one over any of the others. While I could have probably used a single Card to make $100 and finish (Entrepreneur), or swallowed my introversion long enough to make two new acquaintances and done (Shake Hands), those two were both colored white, which I kind of associated with low-risk-low-reward stuff. Easy enough to do, if I got creative sometimes, or cheated and met people off the internet, but often giving kinda crap rewards. I’d actually completed a few of those early on before learning that they mostly gave one to five points that could be used in the system’s shop, which I actually hadn’t unlocked yet. Which was stupid. I was presently sitting on thirty seven cardbucks (my name, not the game’s), that I didn’t have a valid use for. Alternately, some of them gave boosts to resource pools or draw times, but with a reset coming up in… four-ish hours… that didn’t seem like how I wanted to spend my day.

(Wilds Explorer), in contrast, was bordered with a nice, pleasant, sky blue color. Which meant that A) it was probably giving me a card, and B), it still wasn’t going to be impossible to do. It was tasks like this that I’d blundered my way through at the school yesterday, raking in rewards that I frankly hadn’t actually considered at the time.

I’d attempted an orange tinted task before, and I think that getting near the place actually made people start to turn hostile on me. I wasn’t touching a red one. Probably ever.

For now, though, I gave a poke to the exploration sidequest, and claimed my reward. And into my inventory popped two copies of [Wanderer’s Sidestep]. And oh, joy of joys, it had *text* on it.

“Move sideways |---| around an obstacle |---|” Well, that’s already a passive aggressive number of blank spaces. Cost unknown, of course, but it’s nice enough to tell me that it uses Grace. Which is, yet again, frustrating. Because this would mark the very first Card I own that consumes that particular resource, meaning I have one more stat to balance and manage and oh whatever, I’ll figure it out.

I complain a whole hell of a lot, and I’m going to keep grumbling to myself as I plod back down this mountain. But really, this is just one more thing that’s kind of awesome. Every day, now, I’m being pushed to check out something new. To experiment, to learn, and to grow. And I get really, really cool toys. I complained earlier about drawing [Incense], but shit, when I get home, I’m casting that to make my whole apartment smell like some delightful cinnamon blend while I take the longest shower of my life, and it’s just making my life a little better.

It’s magic. Actual magic. And I’m more or less getting the hang of it.

And it’s great.

But I’m still angry at how tall this fucking volcano is.