Chapter 15

Our mad crusade in futility couldn't start until we were better prepared. Coot was level 7 now while Bear was still hovering at 10.

He had a profession, which was something Coot and I needed to get.

At level 10 we could pick our professions. The manual didn't explain how that part was triggered, but Bear filled in the gaps. When he hit level 10, he received three letters in the mail. Depending on which sender you chose to answer was how you picked which profession you were. According to the manual, there were three professions. Bear had chosen the Mountain Man profession. That's why he was covered in furs. Before he had chosen the profession he had been running around shirtless in suspenders and getting his levels by punching and stabbing people. I hadn't realized it before, but he said that melee kills gained you an extra 10 XP. I would have to remember that when I was grinding later.

The manual's description of the Mountain Man profession made it sound like a wild west hippy.

Mountain Man: Anything in those woods needs finding and you're the person they go to. You can track anything in the forest much easier than you could before. Your aim is steadier when hunting animals and you have an increased knowledge on how to use the bounty that nature has provided to your benefit. Find herbs to heal yourself and make spices to boost your buffs from foods you prepare. Comes with periodic Class rewards.

Bear said that he liked the ability to track, as it made it easier to find food. He also liked that it made it easier to hide in nature. Most of the people that he bumped into before he could choose his profession were one of the other classes. If he needed to escape being pursued, he could head for the nearest line of trees and avoid them better than they could chase him.

It was a powerful option, if not for the reasons Bear wanted it, then for the fact that we could give ourselves buffs through our food and better find the herbs and such we would need for healing.

The second profession was called the Ruthless Bounty Hunter.

Ruthless Bounty Hunter: Somebody needs finding, you get it done. Dead or alive (alive pays more, but that's not fun!) and you always find your man (or woman!). As a Bounty Hunter you are more charming by nature. Your persuasion increases when you are talking to witnesses. You can tell if someone is lying to you if you ask them a direct question. Your aim is steadier when aiming at people. Comes with periodic class rewards.

Steadier aiming and the lie-detector skill made that class worth having. Having natural charm sounded like something that would help with my reputation stats.

Gold Digger: You always know where the gold is. Unfortunately, this means everyone knows you know where the gold is. Higher payouts on just about everything and you get "Prospector's Intuition" showing you ideal places to dig to find gold.

Additionally, you get the "Paranoia" skill, which allows you to know when you are being hunted. Killing you will result in any gold not saved in a lockbox being dropped as loot.

Gold Digger sounded incredibly valuable. Forget the gold bits, just knowing that someone was after you was worth its weight in gold. If I had the Gold Digger class and someone was chasing us, we could follow Bear into the woods and hide before they were even on top of us.

For a gang leader, Gold Digger provided some obvious perks. Ruthless Bounty Hunter was a solid choice as well, simply for the added benefit of being able to kill a little better than other folks. No matter which profession you chose, it seemed each were designed for increasing income. The Bounty Hunter class provided more missions, the Mountain Man could sell herbs and tonics, possibly any extra meat products, and the Gold Digger class was literally about being a gold digger. In the end, my choice would be determined by what Coot took. While he looked like he would be the perfect contender for the Gold Digger profession, I now knew much more about him and that new information meant he might choose whatever role he thought would better serve his future in this game.

It was safe to bet that Coot would take the smartest choice before him and I would be an idiot to not ask his advice on my choice as well.

I was smart, but Coot was the first person I had met in either life with three doctorates. I wasn't going to waste him as a resource.

We discussed most of this, as well some very rudimentary plans for how to best start our new crusade before going to bed. There was a lot more to do, but the smart move was to take it one day at a time and one task at a time. Right now, we weren't worth anything until we each had a profession to augment our skills.

That meant we needed to grind.

In bed was when I finally got to rewatch my feeds from Stream Time. That was an interesting experience. There was a book in my tent labeled 'Memories.' When I opened it, it had a list of events with time stamps. There were only two at the moment, but I was sure it would fill up quickly.

When I touched the first time-stamped entry, a window popped up in the book. I watched the entire raid of Easter from behind my head. A third-person view gave me a different perspective of the fight and showed me how close to getting killed I was long before I blew up myself RadicalLarry19.

The part of this that was the most interesting, in this viewing anyway, was that I could see the comments made by people as they were watching live on Stream Time.

It was fun to see that some people knew my plan before I even did. Obviously, people watching the stream knew Larry was there long before I knew who The Colossals even were. The anticipation they were having on when we would meet made me wonder what they had heard about our previous encounter. Larry probably had a Stream Time account. If he did, they probably watched him kill me the first time and assumed there would be some sort of vendetta.

That was a problem, and not just because it made me predictable. Being predictable was the problem. Nobody was going to tune into a regular show if they knew my every move every time I made it. That meant I would need to start varying my tactics and maybe choosing slightly more wild ideas.

That being said, if Larry had a Broadcast button and his people were regular viewers, that was great news. His thing was doing raids, repeatedly. He was boring, but because he was excessively violent he was getting views. I could probably steal some of his viewers just by playing against him. That was easy money.

I would need to ask Eve, if I ever saw her again, where I needed to look to see how much money I was making for Winnie.

With my luck, they would probably not share that with me for fear of me being too much part of the real world again or something. I wasn't stupid. It was obvious that these streams made money for someone else, likely Stream Time and EveNet. That being the case, their rules could be bent if I was more valuable than I am now. Getting a good stream would be the ticket to both helping Winnie and maybe getting favors, such as hearing how well she's doing in life, in the future.

The Easter stream wasn't me at my best and there was not a lot to watch. Reviewing the feed taught me more about the controls and allowed me to evaluate some dumb moves I made after the fact. Later feeds would be more important to review as I became more familiar with my settings. I would be able to hone my skills a little further and evaluate what my blind spots were.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Once I was finished with the review, I closed my eyes and laid back on my bunk. I was finally comfortable enough to not focus too much on the existential crisis of 'what happens to a digital mind when they go to sleep.'

Unfortunately, the resident supermodel turned gnarled old man was not.

"Hey boss," Coot called out from his tent.

"Yes, Coot?"

"We're all just digital code in a digital framework stored on a series of super computers on some data-farm somewhere, right?"

He couldn't see me, but I shrugged anyway. "I guess so. Wouldn't you know better than me?"

"Nah," Coot chuckled quietly. "I was never into computers much." He paused. "But that's my question. What happens when they turn off the power? Do we know if there's a blackout? Or, do we not notice? How do we know that there wasn't some bankruptcy at EveNet, they turned off the servers in the middle of this conversation and some archaeologist three hundred years from when we died is powering them back on for the first time? Did time stop for us and we just ceased existing for a while or would there be an entire reboot sequence that shot us back to starting positions?"

I was about to dismiss this entire conversation as ridiculous when a memory popped into my head.

Tyler and I had just gone to bed. I was almost asleep, much like now, and he decided to start talking to me about the cosmos and what we considered real or not.

"Have you ever heard of simulation theory?" I asked Coot.

"Of course," was all the old man said.

"These questions are valid here only because someone has told us of the new existence we live in. They were just as valid in our old lives. What if we didn't know that? What if we woke up here thinking these were our lives with no memory of the previous versions? That question would still be valid. As a matter of fact, it was valid in our old lives. So, I pose the question to you: In your old life, driving down a highway in Iowa, what would happen if the universe turned off, and then turned on again. The big creators pulling the plug and rebooting it when the Heavenly Father felt like it? Would we notice? Would we notice now?"

"That's not an answer," Bear said. "That's just philosophy or something."

"Nah," Coot said. "That's fair. The only reason we know we're in a simulation is because someone told us we were, but," I could hear the smirk on Coot's crooked face from my tent, "if the real world is a simulation, what are we?"

"Recursion," I said. "Inception. We're the dream within a dream."

"At least once, as we know it. If we're the dream within a dream once, then it stands to reason that we could be the dream within a dream within a dream." Coot said.

"Damn," I whistled. "How do you sleep with so much shit in your head?"

Coot laughed again. "I used to smoke a lot of weed."

That got a good chuckle from all of us.

"Hey," Bear said when we all got quiet again, "they have booze in this world, so they have to have weed right? Where would we get that?"

"Historically," Coot answered, "probably a reservation, if there are any. I haven't seen any, yet."

"Why is the mountain man asking us?" I demanded. "If anyone is going to know what the local flora and fauna is like, it has to be you."

"That's not how it works," Bear explained. "I know what something is when I'm near it. Then a menu pops up explaining how I can use it. Unless I run into some Mary-Jane while on a hike, I won't know anything about it."

"That's dumb," was all that I offered as a retort.

"We should look into that," Coot said quietly. "Otherwise, we're going to have a lot of conversations about the nature of existence before bed."

"Alright guys," I said by way of declaration, "our agenda tomorrow, and perhaps for the rest of the week is to farm experience and upgrade our stats while also looking for what this world holds for intoxicants."

"Big words, boss," Coot giggled.

"Go to sleep."

With that, I was surprised to not hear another word from any of them until Joan was waking us up with breakfast.

My sleep was restful, and I was surprised by how good I felt. I shouldn't have been, but I was still thinking with the back I had before I died. Sleeping on the ground in my late eighties would have been debilitating for at least a week. This young, and digital, body just didn't care.

Joan's breakfast, she claimed, was rabbit stew. I only say claimed because I don't know where she got the rabbit from. Maybe that was what she did with the money I paid her. Either way, it was delicious. I had two bowls. Better yet, it both of my status bars yellow. I was going to be feeling great for at least a little bit today.

"What's the plan, boss?" Coot asked. "How are we going to farm experience?"

"That was something I had been thinking about last night," I said. "The quickest XP comes from raids and jobs, but past experience shows me that we don't have much in the way of said experience to guarantee success at raids."

"You can get jobs just about anywhere," Bear said. "There's always somebody in town or any outlying shack will have someone hovering around needing work."

"I need to see about upgrading my weapons," I nodded at Bear. "So, let's hit a town, get our supplies, and find work."

They both didn't move.

"Nearest town is Easter," Coot said quietly.

I nodded, "Yes, and it is likely that the town could be under attack when we get there." I shrugged. "So?"

The idea was a little rough, but they pieced it together on their own. If we got stuck defending a town, especially Easter, we would fail, but that wasn't all bad. We would get decent experience, some money, and lose an hour, but wasn't that the point?

"I am not going to avoid a fight," I said. "Not when that's the point of what we want to do." I repeated myself, "Town, supplies, work. One way or another." I looked at Coot. "That sound good?"

Both men nodded.

Easter was bustling with activity when we got there. The camp was only two miles from town, and on a ridge. If it wasn't for the trees, we probably could have seen the town long before we got to it. On Horse, we were there quick enough.

The activity in town wasn't anything suspicious or terrible. It turned out that today was Sunday, and by the time we entered town, the church was letting out.

Adeline, unlike before, was in a great mood when I entered the store. I made an effort to strike up a conversation with her. I wanted everyone in this town to at least think of me in a positive way in case I ever needed their help. It was the reputation thing, but I wasn't using it for cheaper prices. The Pink Flamingos were contemplating war. We would need allies.

I filled her in on the raid in Aberdine and saw her mood darken slightly. That was when I turned the conversation to what she really liked to talk about.

"I want to buy a new pistol and a new rifle, but I don't know if I have enough."

Adeline perked right up. "What are you looking at?"

I had her bring out the Volcanic Pistol and the Bolt Action Rifle that I had seen Ed using.

That was when I hit a snag. I wanted both, but I couldn't afford both. My money was sitting at a nice spot, at $367.19, but the Bolt Action Rifle was $250.00 while the Volcanic Pistol was $150.00. It just wasn't going to happen today.

"How about a second holster?" Adeline said.

"What good would that do me? I don't have two guns," I countered.

"Here's the deal," she explained, "I have a piece of shit second holster you can have, free of charge. Then you buy another Farmer's Pistol for $20.00."

"Why would I want another Farmer's Pistol?" I was genuinely curious.

"I saw you the other day when you were fighting off those assholes," Adeline said. "You were good. You don't need a better pistol yet. You just need more options. Get the second pistol, with the second holster, and I promise that you won't regret it."

A little more than $290 later, I had the second holster, a second Farmer's Pistol, and the gun that I really wanted, the Bolt Action Rifle along with all the ammunition that I needed.

I walked out of Adeline's shop just in time to see Bear leaving the doctor's office with a handful of money.

"What's that for?"

He was grinning ear to ear. "I just sold a ton of herbs I had on me."

That was good news. I knew we would be able to make some more money with the professions. Now I was more excited than ever to get to level 10.

That meant only one thing left to do.

"Let's go find that guy who was handing out jobs."