Chapter four) Thrown into the not so deep end. Or, New depths.

With weapons, the choices were kind of limited.

We had a big old knife they called a sword, but at about a foot and a half in length it wasn't much bigger than a Bowie knife, but it was sharp on both sides with a brass looking guard and a round thing on the bottom of the wood handle.

Pretty plain looking really.

Then there was an ax just like the ones you would see behind glass labeled ‘Break in case of fire’ in some older buildings, at least before they started removing them. Only the working end wasn't painted red, but it did have the spike like part on the opposite side from the ax part.

Then there was a ten inch tapered spearhead on a five foot long stick, and what was called a mace. A round metal thing about the size of a hardball on a two foot long dole rod but molded into six blunt sections I guessed was there to concentrate the force into a narrower area.

Sword, ax, spear, and mace. Even though there were various knives, a hatchet, and a six foot long walking stick that could put a hurting on someone, only those four were listed as weapons.

"Huh, weird."

So I decided I wanted some shelves to put stuff in and began to work at the wall to see if I could do some rock removal at something a little more delicate than a five foot wide, thirty foot deep pit.

Shelves, yep. Alcoves with shaped slots to hold all four of the weapons on the one side of the door, yep. Racks to hold up the three types of armor, stiff leather, metal plates on stiff leather, and soft leather with rings sewn on it, yep.

Along with two kinds of shields, a round one with a handle in the middle, and one shaped a bit like a flat topped interstate highway sign that had a handle and strap that went across your arm just below the elbow to help hold it on.

Of course, for right now it was just the mace, the leather suit without the metal, and the smaller shield. I wanted to get at least one of everything important as I worked my way up to whatever limit I had on putting stuff out.

All of this stuff, once I willed it to appear from the Panel, showed up like ghostly white images of what they looked like in their pictures, but I was guessing that the equipment would appear for real only when a trainee arrived.

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So it was like Schroeder’s cat, not here until someone other than me was here to see it.

“Wait, isn’t Schroeder the kid with the piano from Peanuts?”

Well, it was something like that. Whoever he was that guy sure did hate cats.

The rest of the basic starting stuff got put on one shelf, along with a simple backpack, with what they were written in blocky letters on the front of the shelf I put them on.

“I guess that's going to have to do. Let's see about those skills."

I went down about forty feet and widened out the hallway to a fifteen foot by fifteen foot cube to start with. "Okay, show me what skills I got to work with."

The silver edged panel showed up again, showing me a depressingly short list.

Which was Jumping, Swimming, Climbing, and Fire starting.

“That’s it?” I tried to scroll further down the page but that was it. “I guess it won’t be hard to pick just three. It’s more like picking just one to skip.”

But did I? Have to skip one that is? Surely they could unlock more than just three skills, and even if it was only three, shouldn't they get to choose which three?

“Shoot, I hope I’m not screwing things up for anyone.”

I put a ten foot tall tunnel about five feet long to either side of the fifteen foot room, each one opening up into a well lit open topped twenty five by twenty five foot room.

"Might as well give them some elbow room. Now let's do this."

I selected Swimming and got a blue five by five foot square on the floor of the room. Which I could move around wherever I wanted to, even back out into the hall.

Not water, just a pale blue square. Not really there, yet, like the equipment. So maybe it wasn’t water until someone showed up? And how was anyone supposed to learn to swim in five feet of water?

But when I locked it down in the center of the room I made, it was suddenly real. About a five foot deep pool of clear clean water. Right down into the floor of the Strata, the part that I wasn't supposed to be able to dig down into.

Could I...? Nope, the floor still won’t do anything when I try to melt it again. I could make another five foot blue square, but only on the original dungeon floor, not on the bottom of the pool to make it deeper.

But there didn’t seem to be a limit on how many connected pools I could make, either on their own or connected into a bigger pool. Any two squares set down together linked up into a bigger pool. I could even make them go away, returning the floor back to its unvanishable state.

For now, I just made the back fifteen feet of the room into water, leaving a ten foot long wide section of floor running along in front of it.

That was it. Nothing else to work with for the people to learn how to swim and unlock the Swimming skill. I guess I just had to tell people to jump in and swim around a bit.

“...A bit disappointing. I just hope the water has some way of staying clean so I don’t have to make it go away and make a new one every time someone uses it. I cleaned enough pools in my first life."

I went ahead and put up some big one foot tall letters on the solid stone above the ten foot tunnel into the pool room saying 'Swimming.' I had to make them that big so people could read the word with the only light I had coming directly down a thirty foot deep room which was not all that bright, to begin with.

“I hope the Climbing is more interesting.”

Spoiler. It wasn’t.