George woke up and made his way out of the cave. He had seen some small animal tracks twenty meters from the mouth of the cave, and had set two cage traps near them. He didn’t have any bait, but they might wander into the traps out of curiosity. He did a few jumping jacks in the mouth of the cave to warm up, grabbed the sharped stick he call a spear, and quickly walked to where his traps were. Only one of them had been tripped, and inside was some sort of fanged squirrel. George poked it with his spear and it squealed in pain. He tried doing so again, and it dodged. “Come on, you stupid squirrel, just die. My feet are starting to hurt.” He chased it around the cage with his spear tip before pinning it against a wall. He then pushed as hard as he could, pushing down with his weight, and stabbing into the squirrel. As he was getting too cold, he pulled out his spear and ran back into the cave. His toes had started to turn blue, so he buried them in the slightly warmer dirt of the cave’s ramp. He heard the squirrel crying in pain, but he couldn’t put it out of its misery now.
A minute later, after the squirrel had stopped and his toes were warm again, he went out to the cage and grabbed its body, resetting the trap. He then went inside and skinned it, using a sharp piece of flint from inside the mouth of the cave. Once he was done he stretched the skin out flat near a wall of the cave on the ramp and stuck the body of the squirrel on a stick to cook. Of course, doing so would require a fire, and he didn’t know how to do that.
He could clear an area for it, though. As the area of the cave where he slept was above the entrance, he couldn’t build it in the cave or the cave would fill with smoke. So he pushed the snow away from the entrance by about two meters in every direction and dug a slight pit in the middle to build a fire in. After putting another snow ball in his mouth to deal with his thirst, he went out and collected sticks. After five trips he sorted them into dry, wet, and “Good for traps”, sticks that had enough moisture that they were still springy. All of this would be covered up the next time it snowed, but he could store the wood inside.
George checked his status screen, something he had found last ‘night’ while talking to his assistant. Not that this planet actually had nights, since the sun always stayed in the same position. George had even tested this by standing a stick up in the snow and marking the end of the shadow. Several hours later, he came back and the shadow hadn’t moved. Which meant that either this planet had an extremely long day, or was tidally locked to its star. Probably the second one. He had also seen two moons which orbited quickly and a planet. It seemed to move with a bit of speed. That suggested that they were both in close orbit of the sun.
The status screen listed his stats: STR: 9, END 14, DEX 12, INT 15, WIL 13, WIS 12, CHA 9. It also had HP, SP, and MP. For some reason he had the last one even though he wasn’t a mage. Apparently some skills could use it, which he learned about when going through the class skills. There was one called “auto-butcher” which would use MP to automatically process the animals you killed based on your butchery skill. Unfortunately, it required Butchery to be at least level five. One of those class skills, however, would really help in this situation, Survival. It basically just gave you survival skills. That, however, came with knowledge of what was edible and what wasn’t, as well as knowledge of how to build basic shelters and, what he was most interested in, how to start fires.
His Traps skill was level two now, and Butchery and Spears had gotten some experience from his last kill. A kill that almost got him to level 2 as a hunter when combined with the trap making experience. Only needing another ten percent or so, he took a heavy rock from inside the cave and made a simple deadfall trap outside the snow circle.
Now, when George thought about making a fire, several methods came to mind. He doubted he had anything dry enough to light it with a spark from hitting two rocks together, so he decided to make a fire drill. Not a bow drill, though, as he had no string. He flattened a spot on a stick and cut a notch in it, then shaved a dry stick to a point. He then put the shavings in and around the end of the notch, put the point of the stick in that notch, and started spinning the stick rapidly with his hands while pushing downward. After about five minutes he was getting tired, but he had a spark. He added more wood shavings to the spark and gently blew on it and soon had a small fire. He transferred the fire to the pit and added more fuel, then grabbed the squirrel on a spit and angled it over the fire. He briefly looked at the squirrel to verify that it was edible, and after his memories told him that it most likely was, he let it cook as he made more traps.
Katerina’s POV:
After breakfast I started practicing my powers. I needed to kill something or learn to use my powers to level up, but from what I could tell the basic starting powers had two main weaknesses, they weren’t powerful enough to fight with and they used too much mana. I couldn’t use Temperature Control to hurt something, and lightning wouldn’t leave my hands. Every time I tried to throw lightning it only got ten centimeters or so from me before it disappeared. Maybe I could do something with the other two powers, though. With Kinesis I floated a small rock and managed to throw it. It got a bit faster when Kinesis leveled up, but by then I was getting pretty tired. Only a little more magic practice and I could level up and get a new power.
I had looked over the list. Fire Bolt and Ice Bolt required Fire Magic or Ice Magic, which required Temperature Control to be at least five, and Lightning Bolt required Lightning Magic, which required Electric Control to be at least five as well, but Geokinesis and Hydrokinesis merely required that Kinesis be five and you had moved rocks or water with Kinesis. That meant that, assuming I got two more levels in Kinesis, as soon as I leveled up I could choose Geokinesis and then just carry small rocks to fight with. Once I could hunt animals with my magic sling I could level up mush faster.
I took a break and did some stretches. My mana was starting to run low, so I let it fill up. At some point during practicing I had got something called MP Regen. Now I could refill completely in about two hours instead of the ten or so I took before. After eating some more berries, I got to work practicing again. Now that my mana recharged so much faster I could practice much more, so I was able to level up my kinesis to five by the time I was 95% to level two. I had a bit more mana left, so I focused on a leaf, trying to make it as hot as possible. A spot in the center had just started smoking when I ran out of mana.
I might as well gather more resources while I was waiting. As I already had a pile of sticks and cones, I started gathering grass. Maybe I could make something from it. Once I thought I had enough I started making ropes out of grass stalks by weaving three stalks together. Any time one stalk started to end, I added in a fourth beside it, continuing its place in the braid after it ended. After two hours I had about three meters of rope. I didn’t have any production skills for what I was doing to make it easier, but Biological Magic did have a power to make plants grow faster, so maybe I could make grass grow faster in the future.
Now that my mana was refilled, I practiced my spells some more. I made a pile of dried grass and leaves and focused all of my Temperature Control into making it as hot as possible. It started to smoke, and after about five minutes, when my mana was at about ten percent, a tiny fire started.
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Now that I had leveled up, I opened up the level up screen and selected Geokinesis. I would probably get Fire Magic next time, but for now I wanted a way to hunt. Once I felt the squirming in my head stop I made a pebble from nearby float up and threw it at a tree. It hit the tree and bounced off, but it probably flew as fast as a decently strong person could throw it. I just wasn’t one of those people.
Putting enough sticks on the fire to keep it going, I went into the woods to look for an animal. I probably needed to find a source of water first, but the berries were juicy enough that I hadn’t needed one yet.
An hour or so later I made it back to camp. I had managed to hit some sort of bird with a rock and knock it out, then snapped its neck. I got 25% experience for that. My grandmother had made me help her prepare a chicken from her farm before, so I knew how to clean the bird, but this one was closer to a crow than a chicken.
Careful not to touch its beak, as it looked incredibly sharp, I removed the feathers. Now I just needed to figure out how the remove the other parts. I briefly considered trying to emulate the villain from season one of an American TV show about super Heroes that got powers during an eclipse, and cut it with telekinesis, but then I remembered how sharp its beak was. I took a large, somewhat sharp, chunk of quartz and slammed it into the bird’s neck until I had removed its head. The head then became a handle for the weirdly shaped dagger I used to cut off the legs and gut it, piling them up at the bottom of a tree nearby so that I could bury them later.
I added more wood to the small fire and held the bird over it on a stick. I would be eating well tonight, though tomorrow I should probably look for another kind of berry to test and get some more of the kind I had for breakfast and lunch. I needed the juice to meet my water needs.
George’s point of view:
One of the squirrels had tried to take a random nut I found under a tree and put under the deadfall trap when I went inside for a brief nap. So I got a second squirrel skin. Survival had told me that the nut was like acorns, and had to have the tannins leached from them before it could be eaten, so I figured I would see if the squirrels would eat them. Apparently they do.
I used the large squirrel skins as a type of leather shoe, putting the skin on the back and sides under my feet and tying the arms and legs together with some string made from it entrails, using a fang as a needle. The tails were cut off and went on top of my feet. Yes, it didn’t cover everything, and the skins hadn’t had a chance to dry, but at least my feet were warm now thanks to my fir shoes.
The problem was what to do with the meat. I didn’t really need to eat right now. I could leave it here until supper, but it might attract something. And I should probably preserve some food so that I could use it when the hunting failed or when I was traveling and couldn’t hunt. Maybe a smoke hut? My Hunter knowledge included the basics of one, though I didn’t really have any skills to help me, similar to how I didn’t have bowmaking skills, but my archery skill would let me assess the quality of a bow.
I stacked a lot of three to four centimeter thick sticks like a log cabin, then put some large quartz rocks in a roughly square shape with a gap at the front. I then put the cabin on top of the rocks and used a stick from my main fire to light some green wood that Survival told me didn’t make poisonous smoke in the middle of the rocks. The squirrel meat was hung on a thin stick that was stuck in gaps in the walls of the crude smokehouse. Sure, it wasn’t fancy, and I still needed to add a roof so that it would still work when it was snowing, but it was good enough for now. And animal tended to avoid smoke, so it might keep my house safe.
I went out into the woods a bit, now that my feet wouldn’t get cold, and made a much larger deadfall using a dead tree. This one I bated with what was left of the squirrel entrails. Maybe I would get lucky and kill a coyote or other large scavenger. After setting a few more traps around, I noticed something interesting. There was smoke at the edge of the forest at the bottom of the mountain. As their hadn’t been a thunder storm recently, that meant at least one person was there, which gave me a destination.
Katerina’s POV:
As I waited for my bird to cook while braiding more rope, I happened to glance at the mountain. There was smoke up there. Strange. There wasn’t a lightning storm recently. Had a spark from my fire been carried up there? Probably not. That was just too far. That meant that there was another person nearby. Maybe two kilometers away. Had I just gotten lucky, or had that Aati guy done it on purpose?
Whatever the case was, that meant that I needed clothes. After all, you probably didn’t want to be naked when meeting a new person. I took a piece of rope a little over twice the circumference of my hips and folded it in half. After tying a loop in one end, I started weaving the bottoms of clumps of grass stalks into the rope, tying bundles of grass together every two centimeters down the rope. A grass skirt wasn’t the warmest of clothing, but at least it would mean I was decent when meeting a stranger. A woman might be ok, but most men probably wouldn’t have a friendly reaction upon seeing me without clothing. Or rather, they would be too friendly.
Two days later, or at least two sleep cycles later, a man approached my camp. He wore shoes made out of squirrel skins and pants and a vest made out of wolf skins. He carried a spear and a backpack made of even more squirrel skins, though it didn’t look like it was entirely dry yet. I readied a spell in my hand, lightning bolt. Over the last two days I had leveled up to six from hunting, learning fire and lightning magic, and had just gotten Lightning bolt after defeating a porcupine with metallic quills. I had harvested those and brought them back, as they would make good sowing needles if nothing else.
The man said something. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was English. Of course he didn’t speak Russian. I didn’t know much English, but, after cursing in my native language, I tried to piece together a sentence from what I could remember from watching American television. “Me friend. No kill. You not hurt or...” I couldn’t think of the word for ‘fight’ or ‘kill’, so I just let him see the sparks jumping between my fingers.
George’s perspective:
After gathering all that I had prepared for the last several days, including the meat jerky I had figured out how to make, I made my way down the mountain. I was at level five now, and had learned the Auto-butcher skill so that I didn’t need to do it myself, and had managed to get quite a bit of meat and skins, enough to make pants, a vest, and a backpack, at least. I even managed to make a spear by sharpening a flat piece of flint and tying it to the end of a stick. It had taken me several hours to learn to properly sharpen the rock but eventually I earned the ‘Flint Knapping: Level 1’ skill.
I approached the place where the smoke was coming from and saw a young woman in a grass skirt and shirt. Well, enough of a shirt to hide her large chest. And she was only a few years younger than me. “Hello.” I said, waving at her. “I’m George. Nice to meet you. I saw the smoke from your fire and decided to pop by.”
She muttered something in another language and then said in broken English, “Me friend. No kill. You not hurt or...” Then her fingers crackled with lightning. It seemed she had taken a Mage class.
“I’m sorry, I don’t speak your language, but I don’t want to hurt you.” I laid my spear on the ground to show her that I was friendly. She said something in another language. Was that Russian? “Uh, nyet kill.” What other Russian did I know? The only thing I could think of was the lyrics to a cyberpunk anime theme song, so I started singing it.
She looked at me strangely, and let the spell disappear from her hand. I knew that she could probably hit me with a spell before I picked up my spear and ran at her if things went badly, so I carefully reached into my backpack and pulled out a bag of squirrel jerky. Maybe half a kilo. I tossed it to her. “It’s a gift.” I said. “Squirrel meat. You know.” I pointed to the tail hanging off of my backpack. “Squirrel.”
She gave me a strange look, then checked the bag. Seeing what was inside she went over and picked up a basket, then set it on the ground and tried to slide it towards me. It might have went two of the five meters between us. I carefully walked over, being sure not to make any moves that would startle her, and looked inside. It was full of large nuts. I looked at her and she mimed smashing it with a large rock, then rolled two of them over to me. I picked up the rocks and broke one of the nuts open. They tasted like a mix of walnuts and pistachios. “Good.” she said, then walked off to tend to her fire, where some sort of creature was roasting. A few minutes later she motioned for me to come over. When the creature was done cooking, she drew a creature in the ground and laid several metal needles down its back. She pointed at the picture, then the meat.
“Wait, are you saying this is a porcupine with metal quills? Bloody hell.” I pointed to the picture and the meat, and she nodded. It didn’t taste bad.
I ended up staying at her camp for the next few days, leaving for a few hours during the day to set or check traps. The rest of the time I copied what I had at my base. I made a fire pit and moved the main fire there, as it was more efficient that way, built a larger smoker to make more jerky, and set up a place to clean the pelts of the animals we killed. I leveled up from the work and got ‘hide preparation’ as a skill. It wasn’t leather working, but it meant that I could properly prepare the hides so they didn’t go bad. Though, at level ten, it would become ‘tanning’.
She made sure to sleep on the opposite side of the fire from me, apparently afraid that I might try something during the night, so I built two small shelters using my survival skill, one one either side of the fire, with beds made of pine boughs. Or something close to pines. On the other two sides of the fire was a storage shelter, built like the sleep huts, and all of the drying racks for the hides, providing a small amount of protection in case something attacked from that side.
At night we took turns drawing pictures or showing objects and saying the word for it. That, combined with the photographic memory we both appeared to have, let us level up our language skills rapidly.