Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 1

The offices of Blade and Sheath Incorporated were smaller than I expected. Not just that, but they were a lot more run-down. After all, this was the home of the third-largest VRMMORPG on the market, easily pulling in billions of dollars every year in subscription fees. That was without factoring in the cosmetics packs you could buy and the expansion packs they released quarterly. We were talking big bucks.

Maybe it was just me, but I expected some inner-city tower block, maybe situated in between buildings for a law company and an ad executive agency. The kinda place where you were never more than ten feet away from a guy holding a coffee in one hand and screaming into a cell phone in his other. The sort of building that attracted trendy cocktails that popped up around it and clung to it like barnacles on a ship’s hull, finding sustenance on the suited folks who worked there.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Blade and Sheath was basically a digital money printing machine, yet it was born and was maintained in a three-story office building near the south docks. The brickwork was decades overdue repointing, and the window frames looked like a mildly wild storm might shatter their frames.

I adjusted my expectations accordingly.

It made me feel better, to be honest. Made it seem a little less imposing for a guy starting his first day at work. Getting a job here had always been a dream of mine, but I’d never studied computer programming or game design or anything that might get a guy a job at a games company. In fact, despite it being a childhood dream to work at a place where they made games, I’d never seriously pursued it until now.

My route into the company, it turned out, was a strange one.

In the reception area, a busy receptionist ignored a ringing telephone to greet me. She gave me a smile that extended beyond professional and seemed genuine.

“Good morning! Name please, sir?”

“Josh Boothe. I’m here to see Sasha Watts.”

“Ah. Ms. Watts was in a fire blanket meeting this morning. I’ll see if it’s finished.”

“Fire blanket meeting?”

“Sorry. It’s an office thing. There was a problem in the Realm of Geekdom, and all the department heads had to meet. I’ll see if I can track her down.”

I assumed that the Realm of Geekdom meant the game, Blade and Sheath. It struck me as weird that the receptionist of BaS inc would refer to the product that way. Then again, she seemed like a weird lady. Case in point – she had at least three dozen cacti decorating her tiny reception desk. She probably couldn’t even pick up the telephone without stabbing herself.

I sat down, wondering what kind of place this was and what I was getting myself into. While I waited, I looked around reception where on one wall there was a mural of a blood elf warrior fighting a horde of corrupted imps. The style was a sort of graffiti art.

Above the scene was Blade and Sheath’s tagline: ‘For the players, by the players.’

That was the tagline that had drawn me in all those years ago. It wasn’t just a fancy slogan – the devs meant it. BaS was designed to be a massively multiplayer role-playing game, or MMORPG, which would be released and given a gentle nurturing by the devs, but then the players would take it from there.

The sheer amount of customization options in-game was mind-boggling. Players could create quests for other players to follow. They could design dungeons, towers, enemy forts. Given most people’s attention spans, the result was tons and tons of half-finished castles, villages, mountain mines. The base idea of player creation in an MMORPG had merit, but the devs were still fine-tuning the execution. Even so, aside from the odd expansion pack release by devs, it truly was a game for the players.

“Mr. Boothe?”

A woman crossed the reception area. She had red hair tied into a ponytail and she wore a crumpled shirt with the sleeves rolled up at the elbows. Clipped to her belt was a keyring with maybe two dozen USB sticks looped to it.

She stuck her hand out toward me.

“I’m Sas,” she said.

I took her hand and shook it. “Good to meet you. Call me Josh.”

“Super. You’re here for the town-building, right?”

I nodded. “That’s what they assigned me.”

“Sorry to ask. We’ve taken on a lot of staff lately. Lots of new faces, and I suck at remembering them. Last year, I went to my cousin’s wedding, and I forgot the name of my own niece. I’m a horrible, horrible person. Oh well.”

“Don’t worry about it. We never met face to face. You probably know me as a bunch of text on a CV.”

“I don’t read those. Anyway. Come this way, Josh, and we’ll get you set up.”

I followed Sas out of the reception area and to an elevator. Aesthetically, it looked like one of those old still ones where an attendant would take you to whichever floor you wanted. Inside, though, it was a modern elevator. It made me re-evaluate my judgment of this place. Maybe the BaS devs just liked the old, rundown aesthetic.

When the doors closed, Sas hummed the Imperial March under her breath, and she didn’t say a word nor look at me.

I knew anxiety when I saw it, so I did my best to appear relaxed and not draw any attention to how she must be feeling. If Sas noticed, she didn’t show it.

When the doors dinged open, she let out a breath and stepped out.

“Sorry. I hate the elevator. I mean, I know nothing will happen. It’s gotten stuck once in twelve years. But still. I don’t use it when I can help it.”

“I’d have been fine taking the stairs,” I said.

“I normally do, but today has been hectic. There was a fire blanket meeting earlier.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“Not far now. Just this way. Try not to stare at the cages, I don’t want you scaring the animals.”

“Cages?”

Sas nodded at the window of an office right next to us.

‘Cages’ and ‘animals’ meant the devs and the offices they worked in, though she said it with a smile rather than meaning anything malicious by it. We passed by long, open-plan offices where hundreds of people were hunched in front of computer screens and laptops, enthralled in their work. I don’t think a single person even looked up as we walked by the windows. The ones who weren’t sitting in front of screens were lounging on multi-colored beanbags scattered haphazardly throughout the office. Though they were sitting on the most ridiculous furniture possible, they seemed to be having serious meetings and were talking and scribbling notes on ledgers.

Sas was talking to me the whole time now that she wasn’t constrained by the elevator.

“Remind me again,” she said. “How many classes are there in BaS?”

She said it with the kind of forced casualness you’d only pick up on from someone who really sucked at acting.

I realized what this was – she was testing me.

I’d done my homework on BaS when I interviewed for the job, even though I had played it for years. I treated it like I would with any other role that I was applying for.

“A hundred and six classes,” I said.

“A hundred and seven.”

“That’s not what I read.”

“We added the Twilight Steel Shaper class just yesterday,” said Sas. “Tell me something. Did you do any research before applying?”

I gritted my teeth. “Some. How many guilds are there in BaS?”

She raised her right eyebrow, as though she couldn’t believe I’d had the gall to ask her a question. After a while, she said, “Thirty-six.”

“Thirty-five. You removed the potters guild two weeks ago.”

“Son of a bitch,” she said and grinned at me. If everything I had seen so far wasn’t a clue, this was confirmation that Sas wouldn’t be a normal boss.

Sas strolled on, always a step or two in front of me. She talked all the way, sometimes glancing back to see if I was listening.

“As you know from our video chats, I’m head of Player Content Generation,” she said. “If the game feels stale, that’s down to me. Or so my paymasters say. I’m not in charge of BaS expansion packs, of course. That’s an entirely different type of content. Do you know the difference?”

“Between player content and expansion packs?”

She nodded.

“Sure. I play BaS,” I said.

Sas said nothing. Evidently, she was waiting for me to actually say it. She was one of those kinds of managers, it seemed.

I composed my thoughts, then answered. “So you’ve got scripted content, like locations and characters and questlines that the devs make,” I said. “And then there’s the player content system, where everything is made by players.”

“There’s a whole heap of nuance and detail involved but yes, that’s pretty on the money.”

She took me to an office at the far end of the third floor, where there were tons of boxes piled up against one wall. One box was crammed with rolled-up posters. I couldn’t see what was on them, but I remembered the aggressive poster campaign from last year. The posters featured five of the thirteen player races in BaS. Rather than have them brandishing weapons, they were lounging in one of the in-game taverns. The tagline read, ‘Log in. Sword Down. Feet up.”

Having adjusted my expectations already, I wasn’t surprised to see a storeroom full of crap. Not that it mattered much to me anyhow, since I would be working from home.

Sas fiddled with the switch for a set of blinds. When the blinds didn’t move, she rolled them up by hand and then jammed them in place.

“Let’s get a little fresh air in here.”

She cracked open each window one by one. I opened the last one for her. A winter breeze quickly blew in like a tempest that was upset at being kept out so long. I zipped up my coat.

Grabbing two boxes, Sas tapped them and then, feeling they were solid, stacked them in the center of the room. I wondered what she was doing.

She stood on the boxes and reached for the smoke detector set on the ceiling. Twisting it, she removed the lid and then pulled the mains connections, then yanked out the emergency battery.

“Uh…” I began, but she held a finger up.

Standing near the open windows, she took out a cigarette packet and shook out a single cigarette. She popped it into her mouth and then flicked open a silver zippo lighter.

“There’s an extra dollar per hour in it if you keep schtum,” she said, grinning. I must have been wearing a stern expression or something because she said, “Oh! Sorry. Did you want one?”

“I’m good.”

“I should quit, but I don’t have time.”

“Don’t have time to quit?”

“Nope. It’s a whole ordeal. Gotta book a week of vacation so I’m not stomping around the office like an ass. That kinda thing. Better for everyone that I carry on. Anyway, let’s get on with this.”

She extinguished the cigarette in her coffee cup, which still had some coffee in it. Crossing the room, she stood in front of a giant map of the game. Or, actually, two maps. The poster was six feet tall and showed the landmass of BaS, duplicated. The first representation listed all the locations created by the devs. The capital city of Storm Hollow. The dozens of dungeons home to loot and monsters.

The map on the right showed the player-created content. Four towns, thirty-eight villages, and a bunch of smaller hamlets. On top of that, there were hundreds of dungeons and ruins and temples.

I’d explored a few of these when I played BaS but they were invariably half-finished and poorly planned. I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. It got to the point that some folks ignored player-created content, which were represented on game maps as blue dots. I still had faith in the idea, however, and I reckoned the devs just needed to stumble on the proper way of implementing it.

“Let’s find you a VR set,” said Sas.

“You’re giving me a set?”

“Sure. If we were a restaurant, I’d give you a uniform.”

Giving someone a VR set was a little different than issuing them a ten-dollar uniform, but I wasn’t gonna complain. The set I was using right now was on its way out.

She headed to the boxes piled in ten rows. She turned and looked at me, squinting, and held up her index fingers, like she was using them to measure my head.

“You look like a regular adult size,” she said. “Not that there are many choices. Kids, adults, large adults. Y’know. For people with big heads. Do you have a big head, Josh?”

“Never something that occurred to me.”

“No. Your head looks normal-sized.”

“I’ll add it to my CV.”

She grinned, then commenced her hunt through the myriad of piled boxes. While she checked each one for a VR headset that would fit me, I asked her to tell me a little more about my new job and what I should expect.

“Keen. I like it. The player content system is much more dynamic than anything we could come up with in an office,” she said. “And that means good and bad. Dungeons that only stay open for a week. That kind of thing. Creates scarcity. Questlines written by creative writing majors who need an outlet but don’t want to stop playing BaS so they can, you know, actually work on their studies.”

“I’ve played tons of player-created quests and stuff,” I said.

“That’s a touch modest, isn’t it?”

“Ah. So you did read my CV after all.”

“My sec reads ‘em. But she bullet points the good ones and sends ‘em over to me.”

I knew what she was referring to, but I didn’t elaborate. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to blow my own trumpet. I mean, why buy a trumpet if you don’t plan on blowing it?

No, it was the fact that I had been so proud of the Rise of Tower’s Reach questline that I had written and had approved for the game. It had attracted masses of players, and the quest had branched until there were five pathways to finishing it, each with a different outcome. I was paid dividends for every person who completed it.

Then my dog, Baxter, hurt his foot chasing a ball. There was a tiny sinkhole in the grass, and he put his paw in it wrong and broke his leg. I was forced to sell Rise of Tower’s Reach on the BaS auction site for five hundred dollars. That, along with my 5000-dollar savings, helped me afford Bax’s surgery, but every questline I created after that petered out. Nothing caught on like Tower’s Reach.

“This job is for town building, right?” I said. “Not quest writing?”

“Yup. Here.”

Sas passed me a box. The lid was open, and inside were hundreds of little white packaging fillers.

“Lemme get that,” she said.

She scooped the fillers out with her hand and threw them on the floor. Out of empathy for the office cleaning staff I started to pick them up, but Sas said, “Hey! I know I look like an ass, just throwing stuff around like that. But this is a test. I’ve been suspecting for a while now that the people we pay to clean this place are slacking. They’re ignoring the rooms that they think we don’t go to.”

Sas’s whole life seemed to be one series of little tests, grudges, and battles, I realized. I couldn’t live like that. It’d stress me out.

I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

“Here.”

Inside the box was a brand-new VR headset with touch sensors, lovingly packaged with foam so it didn’t get damaged. Tucked to the side was a small, paper manual.

“Wow. Touch sensors?”

Sas nodded. “Nothin’ less for our employees. Besides. You’ll need ‘em.”

At home, I played with a second-hand VR set that I bought from Loot Tree. The vision flickered during battles and the right earpiece wasn’t working. It sure as shit didn’t have touch sensors.

The price of those had steadily dropped over the last few years, especially as VR tech improved. But it was still a luxury I couldn’t bring myself to splurge on. I’d picked up frugalness from my father, and I never replaced things while they still had life in them. That was why I wore a ten-year-old coat every day, one that I’d made so many sewing repairs on that it looked like a Frankenstein’s monster of a garment.

“Is this on loan?” I said.

“Nope. It’s yours.”

“These sell for five hundred dollars,” I said. “What’s to stop me just never coming back and having a free VR set for my trouble?”

“Is that what you’re gonna do?”

“Nope.”

“Well then. Moot point. And that’s the worst kind of point because even the word moot sounds stupid. Anyway, we partnered with Hurrell Tech years ago. These things might sell for half a grand, but they manufacture ‘em for a relative pittance.”

I looked down at the VR set again, hardly believing I now owned one as sophisticated as this. I couldn’t wait to try it out. “Well, thanks.”

“Thank me in a month, once you realize what an asshole I am. Twenty bucks an hour and a VR set might not seem like such a good deal.”

Maybe she had a point. Twenty bucks an hour was way less than I used to make as a junior for a marketing exec company. Back at Oaktree Media I was on a path that went upwards. It was only slowly, but still, my old boss Phil Glendale said I was ready for a promotion and I just had to play my cards right.

Then Bax broke his leg, and even after his surgery, his rehab went slowly. Poor guy needed someone around at home all the time while he got better, and I didn’t have anyone I could ask to do that. Sure, I could pay a dog walking service to check on him twice per day, but that wouldn’t cut it for my best friend. It wasn’t good enough. Bax had been there for me when my parents died, and now it was time that I was there for him. Besides, if I was honest with myself, I wasn’t enjoying it at Oaktree Media.

That meant I needed a job that was work-from-home and had flexible hours. When I saw a job listing for Blade and Sheath inc, I couldn’t believe it.

A job creating player content for BaS was perfect in most ways. It was work-from-home and it was fun. The money wasn’t great, but I’d always been a frugal guy, and twenty bucks per hour were enough to see me through until Bex was fully recovered and he could be safely left alone at home for a little longer.

“Thanks for the set,” I told Sas. “I’m looking forward to getting started.”

“Then let’s get the other stuff out of the way, huh?”

She took me to a staff canteen on the second floor, where she bought me a coffee. I’ve always hated leaving a deed unpaid, so I bought us both a jam doughnut in return. Sas ate the donut like a lunatic, tearing it apart and gobbling the jam-covered bits, then throwing the rest away. I ate mine carefully, trying not to stain my shirt and tie.

“So,” she said. “Let’s talk specifics before my meeting. How’s your coffee?”

“Tastes like crap.”

Sas laughed. “I keep telling ‘em that they gotta buy better stuff. You can screw around with a lot of things, but not coffee. Anyway. Your role. Let’s discuss it. Tell me what you know.”

“It’s town building,” I said. “I’m supposed to start building a player town somewhere in BaS.”

She nodded. “Do you know why we want you to do that instead of just adding a fully made town ourselves?”

“You’re cheap.”

She laughed. “Can’t argue with that. Since the launch of SpaceNet and how that went, we’ve had our budgets cut.”

SpaceNet was their foray into creating a sci-fi MMO, and it did not go down well. That’s what I would say if I was being nice about it. They tried making a game ten times the scope of Blade and Sheath, but they wanted to do it not just five times quicker, but they wanted it done immediately. BaS had grown over time, allowing all its kinks to be ironed out. SpaceNet was released as this big, flabby universe where nothing worked as it should.

“I’m guessing you can’t afford to pay as many people to work on new content for BaS,” I said.

“Yes, but that’s not the whole story. We created BaS with dynamic player content in mind, and we never really cracked that nut. That’s why there are two build interfaces within the game. One for creating physical structures, the other for creating quests, weapons, and spell tomes. Player content didn’t happen by accident; we designed the game with that in mind. Every MMO needs a USP. And I am aware that I use a lot of acronyms, BTW.”

“Why do you need to hire players to create towns if everything is dynamic. Plenty of folks are out there building stuff.”

“Trying to talk yourself out of a job?”

“I just want to understand it better.”

“You’re underestimating the average person’s tenacity. Most people start building a village, hit a hump and then give up. They decide it’d be more fun to go questing or find a dungeon. As such, the game map is littered with the ruins of half-finished dwellings. It’s a bloody eyesore.”

I knew what she was talking about. Most people who built stuff in BaS started too big. Like, they wanted to build a cathedral with a dungeon full of undead demons beneath it. They had an initial burst of motivation and then, realizing their project was too big, they gave up.

I wouldn’t have said the map was littered with such things, though. “Things degrade in-game. I’ve seen it. If something is left unfinished for long enough it begins to disappear.”

Sas sipped her coffee and nodded. “Sure, we built in a destruction mechanic for places that are unfinished and haven’t been worked on or visited in a while. Even so, that only solves half the problem. For dynamic player content to realize its potential, we need dedicated players to be the forerunners. That’s where you come in. Another coffee?”

I looked down at my half-finished cup. “No thanks. I think I get it. You figure that if you pay a bunch of players to create towns, they’ll be more dedicated because it’s a job. When they finish building them, other players will buy into the whole thing and start building their own.”

Sas smiled. “Exactly. You know, they always used to think that nobody could run a mile in four minutes. Impossible. Couldn’t be done. Then a student called Roger Bannister did it. Suddenly, more and more people started running a mile in under four minutes.”

“So we’re the Roger Bannisters of the MMO world.”

“You got it. Create a town, and your job’s done.”

“Seems like an incentive for me to drag this out,” I said, “If I lose my job when I finish what you asked.”

“Are you the kind of guy to drag things out?”

I shrugged. “I could be.”

She stared at me for a moment as if trying to see whether I was joking or serious or just playing some kind of game with her. Finally, she said, “Somehow, I don’t think you are. Welcome to the Blade and Sheath team, Josh.”

Chapter 2

I lived in a small apartment in Templeton South, right above a wok noodle joint that made the best chow mein I had ever had in my life. It was so good that I had to restrain myself from ordering it all the time, instead saving it for special events like my birthday. Or like Tuesday.

Some nights I craved it so bad that I had to shut my windows so that the smell didn’t get into my apartment and try to coax me downstairs, where I’d inevitably hand over nine dollars fifty to Mr. Chen. He always called me Terry. This had been going on for two years now, ever since I moved into the apartment. Way too long for me to suddenly tell him my name was Josh.

“Ah, Terry,” he’d say whenever I walked past the open kiosk. “You look skinny. Sit your ass down.”

As tempting as it was to sit on a stool and wait for the best chow mein ever, my self-discipline usually won out. That, at least, was something I’d always been good at.

After my meeting with Sas at the BaS headquarters, I was starving by the time I got home. The aroma of Mr. Chen’s noodles was almost too strong to resist, and it took a great deal of me telling myself, ‘I have leftover pizza in the fridge, I have leftover pizza in the fridge' for me to walk past.

Before eating or doing anything else, I took Baxter out to make toilet. His leg was healed enough for him to make it outside for that kind of thing, but it’d be a while before we could go on the long walks that we used to love.

I carried him down the apartment stairs and then let him walk along the pavement on a lead. We headed to the dog walker’s park on Smithrye Road, and he did his business. He wanted to stay and have a run around with the other dogs, but I had to be firm about it.

“Sorry buddy,” I told him. “Another month or two and then you can make some friends.”

He was a good boy, and he quickly gave up tugging on the leash and trotted alongside me.

If anything, that made me feel worse. Like I was going to be a heel for the next couple of months. That was how long his rehab was going to take, according to Dr. Loneview, the veterinarian overseeing Bax’s post-surgical needs. Two months was a conservative estimate, and he hoped it’d be sooner. The problem would come in a month’s time, when Bax wasn’t fully healed in terms of his leg, yet mentally felt ready to be running around like he used to. When we got to that stage in his recovery, I was going to have to be the bad guy.

With my buddy taken care of and now sleeping contentedly on the sofa, I reheated my leftover pizza and I ate it so fast I practically inhaled it. Logging onto my PC, I had an email to answer from my old college roommate, Lee. He had a farm in South Dakota, which he’d inherited from his folks. He’d gone to college and studied music, knowing full well that a life of farming awaited him. College was kinda like a four-year-long holiday for him. His latest email was him bugging me to go visit his farm, and I knew I was going to have to cave in sooner or later.

After answering Lee, I was finally ready to log on to Blade and Sheath.

The computer I played Blade and Sheath on at home was shoddy, but that had never much mattered. Tons of people streamed their games these days. Some folks bought digital downloads after the 2025 ruling that said digital games should be able to be sold if the owner chose to, but most people just streamed.

Only collectors bought physical games these days. In my bedroom I had an old game called Cannon Fodder on a floppy disc. It was my pa’s favorite game and I’d bought him the framed disc for his birthday, and after he passed, I put it up on my bedroom wall. I even found an old emulator that let me run the original game, and I had a few beers and played it until I completed it.

The reliability of streaming games meant that my computer was a glorified monitor and control system. Though owning it had meant that I could still play BaS to unwind, I had never got the chance to try the immersion side of things that other people were always talking about.

I unpacked the VR device and tried it on. It was a sleek headset and it weighed less than a drinking glass. When I put it on, the plastic melded itself around my skull, kind of like a memory foam mattress for my head. The result was something that felt as comfortable as a VR set was likely to get. Not quite enough to forget I was wearing it, but comfortable.

Taking it off again, I connected it to my computer and let the drivers install. Meanwhile, I unpacked the movement sensors. These were two gum patches that I was supposed to stick on my forehead.

One of them interpreted movement commands from my brain and applied them to the game, while the other passed stimulus from the game and made my brain believe it was true. Things like the temperature, the texture of objects and how they felt, as well as more mundane yet important stuff like how beer tasted in the game. Supposedly it took a while to get used to when you were in-game and things felt real. It made some folks feel sick, gave others a kind of vertigo.

The tech was fairly old hat by now. The military had been using it for decades before the public got a sniff, which was supposedly the way things went. I heard a saying once that the military tech is always thirty years ahead of whatever the public gets to use. I didn’t know how true that was generally, but it was certainly the case with immersion VR.

A pop-up on my monitor told me that the VR set drivers were installed. I stuck the immersion pads to my head and put the VR set on.

Immediately, my apartment disappeared.

I was staring at a blank screen. A menu system appeared.

Temple TM Virtual Reality Headset 3.01

Initial Boot

Thank you for choosing Temple for your virtual reality needs! To ensure a seamless user experience, we sometimes track browsing behavior, eye movements, and speech patterns for marketing purposes. Do you consent?

“Not a chance in hell,” I said.

I’m sorry. I do not understand that.

“I said no. No way. Not a fucking chance. Ain’t gonna happen.”

Thank you! Preference logged.

Please take a moment to select in-app notification settings.

The menu took me to a giant list of options where outside-world things could break the immersion and alert me about something going on. I configured the basics – apartment fire alarms and that kind of thing.

Even though this was Templeton South, not exactly the swankiest of areas, the apartment’s fire system was a smart one. The owner, Jeff Lenowitz, was crazy about fire safety. Crazy to the point where there was a fire extinguisher outside the door of every single apartment. Some of the tenants joked about it, but I didn’t. I had a sense of humor about pretty much everything, but fire wasn’t one of them, and for good reason.

At any rate, Mr. Lenowitz had preserved the old manual fire alarm system, too. He distrusted modern smart technology, and though he abided by regulations, he still wanted a back-up plan for his residents.

“When the gun jams, you better have a hammer in your pocket,” he used to say. Though I got the spirit of it, I wasn’t quite sure that it made sense.

Inside my apartment, I had the basic smart furnishings that most folks had. My front door was hooked to my Wi-Fi so that I got an alert when someone stopped in front of it for more than ten seconds. Ten seconds was the minimum because I didn’t want it to alert me when someone walked past or if someone was pushing a flyer under my door or something. I added this to the VR notification settings.

Finally, I played with the menu until the VR set registered Baxter’s Smart collar. If my buddy needed me or seemed restless, it would take me out of the game straight away. I had already Bax-proofed the living room and my bedroom anyways, so there was nothing that Bax could destroy and nothing he could jump on or off and hurt his leg.

When I wasn’t in the room, I put a plastic guard around the sofa. Same with my bed. Bax wasn’t happy to lose two of his favorite sleeping spots, but Dr. Loneview said Bax wasn’t supposed to jump on stuff yet. In the meantime, I’d bought him a new bed and put tons of blankets and toys on it.

With the settings set up how I needed them, I closed the notification menu and navigated to ‘games’, where I could access a stream of Blade and Sheath.

By now my pulse was hammering. It might sound pathetic, but I was like a kid with a new toy. I mean, it literally was a new toy. I’d never had a VR set like this before. Only, I was a guy in my twenties and I sure wasn’t a kid. I guess some things never change.

“Here we go,” I said aloud.

I’m sorry. I do not understand that.

“Play Blade and Sheath.”

It took five seconds for a familiar trumpet to call out, followed by the strumming of a loot. Then came the crashing drums that marked the BaS intro music that had been the soundtrack of many nights for me.

I found myself looking at the familiar Blade and Sheath menu system, with a graphic of a blood elf behind it. It matched the mural in the BaS offices.

Even after years of playing, seeing that familiar graphic and hearing that swelling orchestra of music was enough to bring out prickles of nostalgia in my mind. It took me back to summer evenings with the window open, listening to other kids playing outside but not caring because I was having way more fun slaughtering grunders in the Forest of Blackened Hearts.

It took me to weekends with my buddies where we would rent a cottage in the country and drive there in convoys of four people to each car, with the trunks crammed high with pizzas and beer and other such things that had pretty much no nutritional value. Then we’d spend the whole weekend on BaS together, laughing until our stomachs hurt.

Time had plucked each of us from those days and then abandoned us. It had left us all stranded on our own little islands. Some of us got married. Had kids. Others had to take second jobs. My buddy Pete Nortay moved to a village in England where his Wi-Fi connection wasn’t good enough for him to play anymore.

I had never gotten married. Never even got close, but it wasn’t like I’d been looking for it. I left college two years into my course when I realized that I just wasn’t enjoying studying business management, and when the thought of a career in it made me wish that there was a way to fast forward through life and get to retirement.

I thought about just giving up my college course, but the sunk cost fallacy whipped my ass. I’d already sunk so much money and study time into it. What would happen to it all? I couldn’t get it back, that was for sure.

It was Dad who told me, “Kid, the next twenty years are gonna happen like it or not. Why let them happen while doing something you hate?”

A few years earlier, Dad would have said something completely different to me. Dad had been the one to push me into college, and he’d been telling me that business was the way to go for maybe all my life. Only, he had a heart attack when he was 57, and after that his personality completely changed. In a good way. He quit work and cashed in one of his private pensions early. Over the next few weeks he bought a camper van and he grew out his hair and his beard, and then he hit the road, traveling along the east coast and stopping wherever the hell he liked.

So, after a call with Dad, I quit college and I went traveling. I started in the UK, and then headed across the channel and into France, then worked my way inland. I ate goulash in Hungary, drank beer from giant four-pint jugs in Munich, did the cliched ‘holding up the tower’ pose in Pisa. I did it alone, sometimes meeting people in hostels, many times just being content to see all of this for myself, and keep it to myself, too. I didn’t post a single thing on social media. Way, I saw it, I was never gonna do a trip like this again. Why dilute it by spending half the time wondering how many likes my post of a plate of spaghetti got?

When I got home a year and twenty-seven days later, I realized it had been months since I’d even thought about college or business management. I sure as shit hadn’t missed it. I had, however, spent a little time thinking about stuff, and that was how I decided that I kinda liked the idea of working in marketing.

But those days were over, at least for a while, and I had a new job to focus on. It had been a while since I’d played properly, but being back here, looking at that menu screen felt like a time machine ready to let me revisit happier days.

My login details were already filled out from the last time I had played, which was four months ago when I was drunk. I still paid for a BaS subscription. It was one of those things, like my subscription to Amazing Comics Unlimited, that I kept renewing and canceling depending on what kind of mood I was in. I still tried to play BaS sometimes, even though I couldn’t seem to get into a gaming session the way I used to.

I almost logged in automatically. Then I remembered that Sas had sent me a brand-new login that I was supposed to use when I was playing as part of my job, rather than recreationally.

Let’s see…where had I put it? I hunted around my apartment for the scrap of paper that she’d written it on. It was only after thirty minutes of searching that I remembered, who the hell still writes things down? I kept notepads where I scribbled down advertisement ideas and that kind of thing, but it was a little old-fashioned in a world of tablets and smartphones. Checking my emails, I found one from Sas with all the relevant details.

One username and password later, and I selected ‘confirm’. The menu screen disappeared, taking the blood elf with her. A progress bar appeared but was soon filled in, and the colors of Blade and Sheath rushed at me.

Chapter 3

My old world was replaced by a new one, and the effect was jarring. BaS was supposed to do a slow fade-in to give your brain time to adjust, but sometimes it went wonky.

I took a moment to let my head settle, and then I looked around.

I found myself in the middle of a vast plain of scutch grass. It seemed to spread endlessly into the distance, this sea of green, and it only relented where it met the swelling of an oak and birch-filled woodland, or the faint, shimmering shape of a lake.

There was a gentle breeze that I felt teasing through my hair. An earthy smell came from all around me, the aroma of mud that had been soaked by rain. It wasn’t raining anymore, but the clouds above me were thick and mean and full of stormy threat.

For a moment, I did nothing but look around and take it in. It made me remember an old VR advertisement for a driving simulator, with the tagline there’s real, and then there’s REAL.

I had been in this game and in this world lots of times, but never like this. Blade and Sheath in full immersion was everything I had wanted it to be. The crispness of the colors. How sharp they were, like reality but improved to a new level of detail. The feeling of the weather being real, of this being a place that existed in reality. I almost forgot I was even wearing a VR set.

Luckily, it wasn’t an overwhelming feeling for me. Although I’d never owned my own full immersion VR set, I’d been to the immersion cinema on Hope Street, where I’d watched the Die Hard 1 full immersion touch-up version. I remember thinking that there was no better feeling than hearing John McClane yell “Welcome to the party, pal!” and feeling like I really was at the party.

I had yet to convince myself to have the courage to go see Alien: Full Immersion cut. Supposedly in its first few screenings, some folks took off their VR sets and just left the VR center, ashen-faced. Full immersion was an example of a tech that was growing too quickly for society to keep up with, and it showed equal amounts of promise and threat. I could only imagine, for instance, the stuff a psycho with a full immersion rig and a coding background could get up to if he kidnapped people.

It was one thing watching a full immersion movie where you were ultimately still playing a passive part in the whole affair, and another being in Blade and Sheath with full immersion settings. I suspected it would take a long time for the novelty to wear off.

I decided the best way to get used to it was to just get on with things. I checked my map. The area of the game world that I was in was called Gobbler’s Creek. Looking around, I saw a giant forest in the distance, maybe ten minutes’ walk away.

In the opposite direction was a mountain range with various caverns dotted along its rock face. There was a steep pathway gouged into the stone, and it led all the way up the mountain and to a cave that was bigger and higher than all the rest. I knew a monster lair when I saw one, and there was a time when I would’ve set a custom map marker and head straight there. There was almost certainly going to be a cave or tunnel that led deeper into the mountain, and it would most likely be guarded by a boss creature.

This brought it home to me how different this playthrough was going to be. There’d be little fighting or looting. No battles with leviathan boss monsters. No crawling around dark, spider-infested dungeons. Lots of people played as non-violent characters, but fighting had always been my thing.

Maybe this would be a nice change of pace.

South of me was a great lake resting peacefully in the afternoon light. There was a rowboat in the middle, and sitting in it was what looked like a guy or a girl with their dog. They had the oars out of the water and resting across the boat. There were figures standing at various parts of the lake bank. Probably fisherman. Most were probably nonplayer characters, NPCs, though full immersion fishing was popular with players in BaS, too. Especially with the cooking mechanic. Full sensory immersion and in-game cooking were a match made in digital heaven.

In the east, way in the distance, was a town. It was too far away to make out in detail, though my game map listed it as Westfell. It was a pretty small town, and I couldn’t remember ever having been there.

If I looked hard enough, I’d probably find a travelers’ road that led to it, and there would be NPCs merchants and caravans traveling across it and most likely willing to give me a ride for 5 silvers.

BaS rewarded manual exploration if a player walked from A to B. Going the long route might let you stumble on hidden ruins, or meet an NPC with a special quest. But the devs weren’t sadists. They also included quicker ways to get to places. You could hire a horse, pay for travel on a carriage, or buy a carriage of your own. There was also, of course, fast travel, where you could use your map and simply click on a place to travel there.

I’d always been of the ‘damn you I’ll walk everywhere’ school. For me, fast travel took away the game’s immersion. It committed the great sin of modern RPGs – it reminded you that you were playing one.

Deciding to focus on my task, which was to build a settlement that earned ‘town’ status,’ I went back to basics.

With a mental command, I opened my character screen.

Josh Boothe

Level: 1

EXP: 0

Power: 1

Agility: 1

Intelligence: 1

Classes:

No classes earned

Skills:

No skills earned

Perks:

No perks earned

Nothing surprising here. Blade and Sheath’s character system was as efficient as they could get it without sacrificing too much of the RPG side. At least, at first. The further along you got in the game the more options became available to you, and the more you could customize your character. At first, however, it was deceptively simple.

Various tooltips popped up as I studied the screen, but I had played the game for years. I dismissed them. All I’d really wanted to know was whether the devs had put anything special on my starting character, which they hadn’t. Likewise, there was nothing in my inventory. This playthrough was very much a blank canvas.

It looked like I better get started building my town. I gave a mental command to partition a tiny corner of my VR screen, and I used it to bring up a web browser. I visited a website called Blade and Sheesh. It was the go-to resource for anything BaS related and had a pretty active community.

There, I navigated the ‘guides’ section, where someone had made a player’s guide to creating a town.

Before you can earn the ‘town’ status, your project must progress through various stages. These being: hamlet, village, settlement, and then town.

After town there is a ‘city’ stage, though no player-built location has ever become a city.

Each stage has five levels, and each level has certain requirements to achieve them.

“Let’s see. Hamlet level one…”

For hamlet level one, I simply needed to construct a group of houses. 'Group' being, for the purposes of BaS, three or more. There were no guides on what the houses should be made of, only that they satisfy the basic requirement of having four walls, a roof, and a door.

That shouldn’t be too difficult, I reckoned, though the requirements for hamlet level two were bound to be a lot tougher. BaS was known for its jumps in difficulty between levels.

I decided not to look at the requirements for a level two hamlet just yet. It’d be overwhelming. If you’re eating an elephant, it’s best to start with one foot.

I gave a mental command:

Create priority list: ‘House Building’

1) Find out what skills are needed to build a house

2) Learn level 1 in each skill

3) Gather house building materials

4) Build house

The priority list that I nicknamed ‘House Building’ was added to the list screen, a menu option that I could recall just by thinking about it. Not everyone utilized the list option in BaS, but I liked it. I’ve always been a list kind of guy. When I was eight years old, I even started a list of ‘Things that Josh Boothe likes’, and for a full year I wrote down every single thing that vaguely pleased me. Unfortunately, I lost it in the fire that burned down our old house on Maple Drive.

Anyway, I had a direction to go in now. I just needed to look up what skills I needed, and then set about earning them.

Before I could do anything, a man appeared in front of me.

He was 6’1” tall, a similar height to me. Like me, he was wearing the noob starter outfit of brown trousers with a hemp belt, shoddy boots, and a beige work shirt made from rough wool. His hair was thick and curly, and its mud-brown color matched his eyes.

Above his head was a green player tag that read ‘Lincoln Garter’.

“Hey,” said Lincoln.

There was no player versus player fighting in BaS, except for in arenas where both parties agreed to it. You could only find arenas in the bigger cities in the game, such as Storm Hollow and Vestefall. I tended to stay away from those places – way I saw it, I lived in a city in real life. I wanted a break from the chaos when I logged onto BaS.

The reason that there were so few opportunities for players to fight other players was that PVP was seen as discouraging for sub-level 20 players. Discouragement was the last thing that the devs needed for noobs. A discouraged player was less likely to let their subscription run on.

This meant that I wasn’t particularly concerned about the guy standing in front of me.

“Uh, how’s it going?” I said.

“You got the look of a guy who didn’t expect to see me.”

“It isn’t the kind of place I expected to bump into someone. And this isn’t a normal starting place for new players, either. So I’m guessing you’re working with Sas,” I said.

“She didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Oh. Well, I better explain.”

Lincoln Garter, I learned, was a BaS employee like me. He was part of Sas’ initiative to create some true player towns, though Lincoln lived fifty miles east of New York, so he’d never met her in person. His interview and induction were conducted by webcam, and Sas had couriered a VR set to him.

“Got the job without needing to get dressed,” said Linc. “One of the few things I like about the modern world.”

“You didn’t get dressed at all?”

“I was wearin’ a shirt. Sure. But I didn’t bother to change outta my jim-jams.”

Linc was a forager, which meant that he spent his time outdoors collecting all kinds of herbs and veggies that anyone could find if they knew where to look. Although foraging was useful in stocking his cupboards, it didn’t pay the bills in and of itself.

So, Lincoln got a tech-savvy friend of his to make a simple website and he started a foraging tour business, where he’d take groups of city folks on hikes around the country, showing them the loot you could pluck from mother nature if only you knew where the loot drops were.

“How was business?” I said.

“Eh…alright. Enough to live on, but not enough to squirrel some dough away. I don’t know what it is. The folks who come on a tour, they love it. Check me on TripAdvisor – the only crummy review I got was from a fella named Reasel, and he was being an ass the entire time. Talking over me, picking up berries even when I told him not to collect anything unless I say so. You know. On account of it being poisonous. Finally, I had to tell him to shut his mouth. Hence the only one star review I ever got.”

“I’d love to do something like that. Weird that you’re not attracting anyone. Maybe you need a USP. You know. You could sell it as a ‘survival tour’ or something like that. Folks like pretending to be tough.”

Linc tapped his chin. “You know what…that might be an idea. When I can actually start giving tours again.”

“What’s a cool thing that I could forage?” I asked.

“There are loads of things! You don’t realize what you got sitting out there, buddy, just waiting for you to find it. Folks will happily go to a grocery store, but they ignore the fact that mother nature’s got her own store set up, and the best thing is that it won’t cost you a dime. Take dandelions, for instance. You can make a salve with the petals. The roots make a good coffee. And you ain't lived unless you’ve tried dandelion and burdock soda.”

“My aunt used to make nettle tea.”

“There ya go. Nettle soup’s a good one, too.”

“You know, you don’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d enjoy working in BaS.”

“Ah. Well. I’m not. This place fucking sucks.”

“So why are you here?”

“Because I’m an idiot. I was guiding a bunch of folks in Poulter’s Ravine, and there was a pretty girl with them. I started showing off. We came to where the river swells fastest, where there’s a stone path across the river and you gotta jump from rock to rock to get across. Only, you can’t do it in winter, and especially not after it's been raining. I know that because I’m a guide. But I’m also a show-off…”

“So you tried impressing this girl, and you hurt yourself.”

“Broke my ankle. While it’s healing, I gotta earn cash. The way I see it if I can’t work outdoors in real life, why not do it in a game? Beats work-at-home customer service for the same pay. I’ve got nothing against those folks, I admire ‘em if anything, but I’ve never been able to do a desk job. What about you?”

I told Lincoln about Baxter and how I needed a job where I could work from home, at least for a little while.

“I love dogs,” said Lincoln. “My sister’s a cat person. She has this horrible little freak of a thing. You know, those hairless ones? It looks like a fuckin’ demon.”

“Cats are just dogs for people who hate affection,” I said.

Lincoln laughed. “Call me Linc.”

“Josh.”

“Yeah. I can see you’re called Josh, buddy. Your name tag’s right there above your head. Only, mine says Lincoln, and I’m saying you can shorten it. Call me Linc. All my friends do.”

“Right. So Sas told you we’re working together?”

“Yup,” said Linc. “Four teams, each with three people. We’re supposed to build a town. I reckon that might take a week. Maybe less?”

I laughed. “You’re in for a surprise, Linc. But at least she mentioned that part to me. I didn’t know I’d be working with anyone else.”

“Loner, are ya?”

“Kinda, but it’ll be cool to work together.”

It didn’t surprise me that Sas had left that part out. I doubted she’d done it on purpose – her day just seemed chaotic, that was all.

Linc looked around. “So, what’ve you found so far? Any resources nearby?”

“I haven’t looked. But to get a level 1 hamlet, we need to build three houses. I was gonna look up the skills you need to build a house, work on earning them, and then gather wood and stuff like that.”

Lincoln put his hands on his hips. “Right, buddy. then how about this. You work on that, And I’ll have a little explore and see what’s worth gathering.”

Chapter 4

It turned out that there were a number of skills that would allow a player to build a house. Some were more complex than others, and many of them involved mixing two or even three skills together. For instance, someone with the stonemasonry and carpentry skills could combine them to create a house using both materials, whereas someone with only the carpentry skill would have to make a house using just wood.

While I researched town building, Lincoln had been exploring the area around us, going as far as the woodland in the distance without entering it and then walking back in a circle. Every so often, he stopped and inspected something in the grass. He plucked leaves and pinched them between his fingers, rubbing them until they wore away. He brought petals up to his nose and sniffed them.

When he returned, he emptied his inventory out onto the ground, littering the grass with different colored flowers, stalks, and pinecones. Some of them were tangles of thorny vines, while others looked like the herbs you’d find in real life, except colored sunlight yellow or a deep purple.

I’d never played as a forager, ranger, potioneer, or any of the classes that involved heavy herb use. To me, if I could buy a potion in a shop, then I was happy.

Linc stood with his hands on his hips and looked down at his flowery trove. “Well. These must do something,” he said. “I don’t know what, but something. I need the foraging skill before I can identify them. Botany might work, too. Shame my real-life skills don’t transfer into BaS.”

“On the subject of skills. I’ve been reading into it. There are a few ways to build a house. The improvisation skill lets you fashion a hut out of whatever materials you can lay your hands on. Whereas carpentry lets you build a more stable structure but it takes longer to learn. Then there’s architecture, brick working, metallurgy. The more skills you have, the better a building you can create.”

Linc didn’t answer. He was kneeling in the grass again, studying his foraged loot intently.

“Linc.”

“Huh? Sorry, buddy. Got wrapped up in something. You were saying?”

I repeated what I’d told him, which Linc folded his arms and considered.

“How about this,” he said. “If we’re working together on making this a town, then I propose a division of labor. You do all the planning and building, and I’ll be in charge of gathering resources.”

Planning a whole town seemed like a task. Then again, until I met Linc, I’d been expecting to have to do that. At least if he was in charge of procuring resources, I wouldn’t have to make journeys to the woodland for timber, or go to the mountains to mine stone and metals.

The division of our skills seemed like the best way to do it, to me. IT left us free to specialize in specific skills rather than having to be mediocre at lots of them.

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

“Right. So I can call myself Head of Resource Procurement, can I?”

“If that’s what you wanna do.”

“Just sounds fancier, that’s all. I never wanted a desk job, but I’ve always envied folks who have fancy titles. Tell someone at a party that you’re a forager and they look at you like you’re begging for change on the street.”

“Seriously? I think it’s awesome that you do something different.”

“Then maybe you should meet my parents,” laughed Linc, “Because they sure as shit don’t agree. Now, as Head of Procurement, I have a lot to do. But the first is to ask ya this – what’s your title.”

“Builder.”

“That’s it?” said Linc. “Builder?”

“It’s simple. Does the job. a little like me.”

“Alright. Whatever makes ya happy. Anyway. What say you learn those skills you were blabbering about, and I’ll see what materials I can scavenge?”

“Deal. Listen, Linc. You’re new to BaS, aren’t you?” I said.

“Sure am.”

“Okay. I better tell you a couple of basics so you don’t make the mistakes I did on my first ever playthrough.”

“Ah, this can wait. Foraging’s a-callin me.”

“Trust me. You’re gonna regret not listening.”

“Alright…”

“So, we’re both level 1, okay?” I said. “That means right now, we have a skill limit of 1. We can learn one new skill, and we can’t learn another until level 2, at which point we get another skill slot. And so on and so on, for every level. What I’m saying is, be careful what you choose. Removing a skill can be done in towns, but it’s expensive, and you lose any ranks on that skill if you do that.”

“Choose skills carefully. Got it.”

“You can look it up online if you need more information on whether to choose a skill. Secondly, there are a couple of ways to level up. There’s the classic way – kill monsters and earn EXP. Then there are tons of quests you can accept in town where you get EXP as a reward. But we’re building a town here, so we aren’t gonna be doing much fighting or questing. Besides, we wanna be careful leveling up that way, in any case.”

“We do?” said Linc.

“Yup. However you choose to level up affects the kinds of perks you get. Leveling up through combat will mean you get to choose mainly combat perks.”

“Right. So we need a way of leveling that unlocks perks more focused to building our town.”

“Exactly.”

“What’s this third way of leveling up?”

“Skill use,” I said. “BaS is all about giving players a choice of how they experience the game. If you had to level up by fighting, then your experience is still limited whichever way you look at it, because you’d have to spend all of your time fighting stuff. So, there’s another way to level, and that’s by using your skills. Earn a skill, successfully use it enough, and you earn exp.”

“Right. So if I was a chef, for instance…”

“Then you’d level up by cooking things.”

“Got it. I’ll bear that in mind.”

Linc headed off toward the woodland in the northeast. The day was wearing on now, and the woods had an unwholesome darkness that hadn’t been there when the sun was at its highest. Linc, at least, knew enough to avoid straying too close to it while we were low level and unarmed.

While he was gone, I checked the guides on the Blade and Sheesh website and scoured their skill list. The top building skills like architecture were hard to get and required me to have some lower crafting skills first.

You gained skills in a few ways in BaS. One was by repeating a related action until you got the chance to learn the relevant skill. Another was to read a skill tome, which were available in book shops. Finally, you could jump the queue and just pay a master or skill trainer to teach you a skill.

What this meant was that a skill like architecture was out of my league for now. Even if there was a city nearby, I A) didn’t have money to pay tuition and B) hadn’t leveled my intelligence enough to be able to earn a skill.

Further down the list of skills was carpentry, a sort of catch -all skill where woodwork was involved. The requirements for carpentry were as follows:

Carpentry: ‘Apprentice’ level requirements:

Power: 2

Agility: 4

Intelligence: 4

[Optional] 1x instruction from a carpentry master

The ‘1x instruction’ meant that I had to find a carpenter NPC and get them to teach me, usually for a set fee. Players who reached the master level could also become trainers in the skill, selling their expertise for gold. They weren’t allowed to undercut NPC trainers, however, so there was no possibility of them selling enough training to boost someone to master level for a stupid price like 10 silvers.

I couldn’t afford to buy carpentry instruction just yet, so I was going to have to learn a skill that didn’t have any cost attached to it.

When Linc returned from his exploration six game hours later, which in reality was fifteen minutes, he bought with him a load of timber that he’d found in the woodland.

“Hopefully this will help,” he said. “I didn’t realize that my arms’d feel tired in here. This place is way too real sometimes. One of my first acts as Head of Procurement is gonna be to get a cart or something.”

“This looks great. Thanks.”

Most of it was just branches that he’d found on the forest ground, which he’d collected after piling the rotten branches to one side. The ones he was left with were long and short branches. Thin and wide ones. A very varied selection, and not the kind of wood we could use to make houses. Still, it would be useful.

“There’s no shortage of trees, let me tell you,” said Linc. “The herb picking gets better the deeper into the forest you go, too. But it gets dangerous.”

“Did you run into trouble?”

“I died, Josh. So yeah, you could say that.”

I must have missed Linc straying far into the woods to get attacked. Maybe I did need to have a talk with him about that after all.

“What penalty did you get?” I asked.

“Lost half of my inventory. And I got a speed debuff for five minutes. That’s why I wasn’t back sooner.”

“If you’d gone back to the place where you’d died, you could retrieve any inventory items that you lost. They won’t stay there forever, though. You gotta be quick. Anyway, maybe avoid the deep forest until we’re better provisioned.”

“Ah, damn it. That’s where all the good stuff is, it seems like.”

Linc took all of his gathered herbs from his inventory and began studying them, trying to earn the foraging skill. Meanwhile, I got to work on some skill learning of my own.

First, I searched through the sticks and branches until I found four that were as long as my forearm and an inch wide. I set these on the ground. Next, I took some of the vines that Linc had brought back. I tore the vines into stringy strips.

After searching around the fields for a while, I found five rocks that were the size of my hand. They were all shaped differently, but with one similarity – they had at least one edge sharper than the rest.

Using the sharpest rock, I gouged a slit at the top of one stick, carving the wood until the slit was four inches long and two wide. I slotted one of the sharpened rocks into it, then used vine string to secure it in place, wrapping the string around it until it was about as secure as it was ever going to get.

Item Improvised: Crude Axe

You have made progress toward the [improvisation] skill.

“Hey, Linc. Linc.”

With a great struggle, Linc tore his attention away from a strange-looking plant he was studying. I was quickly learning that Linc had that rare kind of attention span where if something interested him, he would get absorbed in it deeply to the exclusion of everything else. My cousin, Moe, was the same if you put a soldering iron in his hand and placed a circuit board in front of him.

“What’s up?” said Linc.

In answer, I broke the number one rule of schools all over the world – don’t throw scissors. Only instead of scissors, I tossed the axe to his feet.

He picked it up, inspecting it by turning its handle around.

“Not bad. Not bad at all.”

“It won’t let us chop down trees or anything, but maybe we can hack branches off.”

“Thanks, Buddy. Here. Take this.”

He tossed a plant to me. It was a long-stemmed plant with two blood-red furry balls growing on the end.

“This is a healing plant, supposedly. It’s supposed to be boiled into a potion, but eating it will restore your health, too. Just not as much.”

“Did you learn the foraging skill, then?”

“Nope,” said Linc. “I’m using the Blade and Sheesh website like you told me. But when I learn foraging, I’ll be able to focus on a particular resource and my map will start showing me where those things are. Be right back. Gonna explore a little more.”

With Linc gone, I made four more of my crude axes. I placed them in a pile beside me. It was when I finished the fifth one and set it down on the ground with the others, that I got a notification.

You have learned a skill – improvisation.

Rank: Apprentice

A resourceful skill that allows you to create crude tools and structures from various materials.

Do you wish to accept [Apprentice] improvisation?

This wasn’t the greatest skill to commit to a slot, but I was a level 1 player. I didn’t have much choice. I needed to earn EXP, and if I wasn’t going to be fighting stuff, then I needed a skill that I could use to generate it. And if improvisation came in handy in town building, then that was great.

I also needed to make money, and this was a step in that direction. For instance, I could sell my crude axes to a merchant NPC when I saw one. They wouldn’t fetch much gold – especially not without a bartering skill – but every penny helped.

When I accepted the skill, a notification told me that [Apprentice] improvisation had been added to my usable skill list.

Testing it, I put 1 stick, 1 string vine, and 1 rock in my inventory.

I mentally clicked on the improvisation skill.

Ingredients:

1x wooden stick

1x String vine

1x asphalt rock

Available Improvisations:

Crude axe

Crude Bola

Crude knife

Crude spear

Crude hammer

The bola was a weapon where a lump of stone was tied to the end of a rope. I’d never used one, but an educated guess told me you either swung it at stuff or maybe swung it around your head to build momentum, then released it. It didn’t have much of an attack rating, but it was good to know that I could create a weapon even if it was rated as ‘crude’.

The other things were more useful to me. The knife would have all sorts of utilizations, whereas a hammer was going to be key in building structures. Likewise, we could use crude axes to cut branches from trees and collect them for timber.

Right now, I just wanted to test the skill. So, I selected ‘crude spear’, thinking that Linc’s resource gathering might also include hunting.

A timer appeared over the ‘improvisation’ symbol on my skill list. It was there for just five seconds, and then a spear appeared at my feet.

Kneeling down, I picked it up and inspected it. It was a shoddy thing, really. It amounted to just a sharpened stick. The beauty of it was that it had taken me no effort at all to make it. Without the improvisation skill, I would have had to sit there with a sharp stone and spend time sharpening the tip of the spear. Now, as long as I had the ingredients in my inventory, I could make a spear just by giving a command.

When Linc returned two hours later I tossed the spear to him.

He flinched and lifted his arms up to his face.

Since I hadn’t been trying to kill him or anything and hadn’t put force into it, the spear fell by his feet.

“You dope,” I said. “Even if PVP was enabled, do you think I’d try to kill you with something like this?”

“Caught me by surprise, is all! I keep hearing growling sounds coming from the woods, and it sounds so real that it’s gotten me on edge. Anyway, what’s this?”

“A spear,” I said.

“I know. I mean where’d you find it?”

I told him about my improvisation skill. Linc was impressed, and told me in return that he’d earned the apprentice level of survivalism, which included a foraging aspect. As much as it pained him to be an apprentice in the game in a skill that he’d mastered in real life, he was happy to have achieved it.

“If only skills transferred into the game,” he said. “Or even vice versa. Like, imagine you could practice a craft skill in the game, and then use it outside. Come to think of it, why isn’t that a thing?”

“Because learning a skill usually requires some kind of muscle memory,” I said. “But we aren’t really using our muscles. It’s all about the pads on our temples. When you pick something up in BaS, you aren’t actually grabbing it with your hand. It’s just an electrical impulse or something.”

“Just seems to me there are better applications for this kinda tech than a game.”

“Tech goes where the money is,” I said.

The sky above us had been darkening for a while and now it was completely black, save for the whites of stars winking at us from digital galaxies far away. This meant that maybe forty real minutes had passed, since it had been early morning when I began my playthrough, and game days were just shorter than an hour.

With the coming of the night came a chill. Not as cold a chill as in real life, since nobody would want to play a game where they froze their asses off, but a notable chill nonetheless. It was on the very edge of comfort, where if it was any colder it would have been unpleasant. It was a clever balance – enough to add to the immersion, but not enough to make you want to log off.

“How about a fire?” said Linc.

“How about a burger and a beer?”

“I’m serious. My survivalism includes fire lighting. But I’ll need a knife.”

I passed him the crude knife I had made earlier. Using some timber, Linc made a fireboard and cut an angular notch in it and then made a depression in the wood. From one piece of wood he cut a spindle and he bent a more pliable branch to create a bow. After using string vine to create tension on the bow and spindle and then creating a little tinder nest, Linc announced that he was done.

“Voila. A one hand drill for fire starting. Bon Appetit.”

“Did you take French lessons at school?” I said.

“No, why?”

“Never mind. So we use the drill to start a fire? I saw this on Survivor Jones once. It took him ages.”

“Survivor Jones wasn’t playing BaS,” said Linc. “And he didn’t have the survivalism skill. Aaaand…the guy’s a giant fraud.”

“You got a problem with Survivor Jones?” I asked.

“All his shows are scripted. Guy hasn’t spent a real day outdoors on his own in his life. Don’t forget, on these shows where it looks like he’s stranded on his own…who’s holding the camera?”

“Good point,” I said.

With a working hand drill, Linc’s survivalism allowed him to start a fire simply by selecting the skill. One second there was nothing, the next there was a fire glowing red and orange and spreading a welcome heat over me. If I had tried to use the hand drill, it would have taken a lot longer since I didn’t have a relevant skill, Similar, Linc couldn’t craft improvised tools with the speed that I could.

I sat a little closer to the fire, salivating over the prospect of catching a rabbit or hare and toasting some meat.

Suddenly, my healthbar glowed red, and a quarter of it drained away.

An arrow was sticking out of my thigh.

“The hell?”

Linc stood up, pointing. “Over there! A weird…uh…thing!”

I got to my feet and yanked the arrow out. I didn’t feel pain, since the full immersion regulations signed two years ago prevented it. Instead, I felt pressure on my thigh where the arrow had been.

More arrows whizzed at us. One stuck in the mud near my right foot, while another smashed through into the fire and sent embers flying. Linc got to his feet, holding the crude knife I had given him.

From my inventory I took out my crude spear, which I had about as much confidence in as a sword made from chocolate.

“Holy fuck! I wasn’t ready for how real this would feel. My heart’s pounding,” said Linc.

“See anything?”

“Nothing. Whatever it was is hiding now.”

A scream pierced the stillness of the night. It was a strange, guttural scream made from something almost certainly inhuman. It was soon followed by another scream, and then a third.

Then, a shape emerged from our east. It was a woman, and she held something in both her hands. She tossed whatever it was at us. Then she tossed another. Then another.

In the glow of the firelight, I saw what they were – corpses. More specifically, the corpses of three grunders. Grunders were one of many low-level creatures in Bas. Waist-height and possessing basic intelligence, they were group hunters that could use weapons such as bows and arrows and swords. They looked like hairless rats that walked upright.

“Are you guys trying to get killed?” said the woman.

The green tag above her head revealed her to be a level 3 player called Hilly-Rose. She was shorter than Linc and me by a few inches but she more than made up for it in muscle tone. It looked to me she’d leveled the old-fashioned way by killing stuff, and this has increased her power ability. In turn, the change in attributes had shown on her physique.

Unlike Linc and me, she was wearing a leather chestpiece and leather gauntlets that covered her hands and most of her forearms.

“Sas said there’d be three of us,” said Hilly-Rose, “But I was beginning to doubt anyone was showing up. So I went looking for fun.”

Chapter 5

Hilly-Rose, who told us she preferred being called Hilly but had also adopted the stage name of Lil Ro during a failed attempt at music stardom when she was twelve years old, had been recruited by Blade and Sheath four weeks ago. They put her on ice - metaphorically speaking - until today, at which point her employee login credentials for BaS activated.

“Sit by the fire, traveler,” said Linc in a stupid wizard-like voice – “And tell us your tale.”

“Huh?”

“We’re gonna be working together. So let’s get to know each other.”

Hilly shrugged and settled down in front of the fire. The flames flickered upon her blood-splattered shirt. “Well, okay,” she said.

Hilly’s tale wasn’t much worth waiting for, she told us. Outside of BaS, Hilly had tried lots of jobs, trades, and college courses. She’d tried so many that it was like she was trying to collect them.

“It exasperates my sister Lou, but nothing sticks with me. It’s like I got this weird tweak of personality where I get heavily invested in something for a few weeks or a month and really delve into the details, but then the interest wanes. Before I know it, I’m moving on to something else. Same reason I’ve had tons of relationships and never celebrated an anniversary, and why I’ve lived in eight different countries.”

“Nothing wrong with itchy feet,” said Linc. “Usually a sign you’ve got some scratching to do. Where are you living now?”

“I burned through my savings, so I’m back home. Evanston.”

Hilly had already leveled up three times, which put her ahead of Linc and me. I asked her what she’d been up to during that time.

“So I logged in, I started here, waited around a while, then got bored. Started exploring a little and kept getting attacked by grunders. They killed me three times in a row and gave me some real bitches of debuffs. Then I managed to get one of them. I knocked the little shit out and he dropped these leathers. They’re my size. Who knew? It got a little easier after that, and then when I leveled up and scored a point in power, it got easier still.”

“We’re lucky you came back when you did,” said Linc.

“Ah, well. You’d only have died. It isn’t like you die in the game and die in real life, like some crazy sci-fi movie.”

“So I guess that makes the three of us,” I said. “Between us, we’re supposed to build a town, huh?”

“Yup. We just need to settle on a name.”

“Is that important right now, when we don’t even have a chair to sit on, let alone any buildings?” said Linc.

Hilly shrugged. “I’d just feel better getting it done. Naming a thing makes it more real.”

“Alright. How about Danfoss,” said Lincoln.

“Eh, that’s not particularly bad but it doesn’t seem right.”

“Nantwich.”

I shook my head. “Sounds like a place you’d read about in Anne of Green Gables.”

“Mirfield,” said Lincoln. “Trudi. Garial, Luling, Kinkallen.”

“Where the hell are you gettin’ these from?” said Hilly. “Are you using a fantasy town name generator or something?”

“…yeah.”

“I have something,” I said. “What about Hill Valley?”

Hilly and Lincoln looked at each other.

Then shook their heads simultaneously.

“This isn’t a hill.”

“And it ain’t a valley.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s the name of the place in Back to the Fu…you know what? Let’s settle on a name later.”

Daylight seeped into the sky not long afterwards, marking the start of a new BaS morning. Hilly, who had appointed herself as the head of security for our community – when it actually became a community – gathered the corpses of the grunders. There were three of them.

“Whistle while you work,” she sang, almost under her breath, “just whistle while you work…”

She took three of the biggest branches that Lincoln had brought from the woodland and she drove them into the ground. Unhappy with how deep she got them, she removed the branch from the ground, dug a deeper yet narrower hole using the tip of her sword, then stuck the branch back in so it was upright, like a pole.

She shook the pole. It stayed put. “That’ll do,” she said, then dug another two holes for the other branches.

Then, she used vine string to tie the grunder corpses to them. They formed a grisly triangle, with a dead grunder staring out from each point. It looked less like the peaceful village I had in mind, and more like the future construction site of Vlad the Impaler’s holiday home.

I was about to tell her that stringing up corpses wasn’t the best way to start building a town, when I got a notification.

Buff received

Your current location has received a buff.

+50% deter [weak] grunders

+10% deter strangers

That changed things a little. I hadn’t realized that stuff like this would give our town buffs or debuffs. I guessed it was part of the whole player-content system. The things you did mattered.

Linc eyed the corpses. “Really?”

“It’ll stop them attacking while we’re building stuff,” said Hilly. “Unless you got a better idea?”

“At home, when I had mice in my house, I laid humane traps.”

“And did that work?”

“Not really. I see now that what I should have done is killed the mice and then strapped them to tiny popsicle sticks and arranged them all around my house.”

“You mock,” said Hilly, “But if something works, it works.”

From the ground where the grunders’ corpses had been, Hilly looted three bows and twenty-six arrows. She gave a bow to each of us, and we split the arrows between us. I got six.

The bow was a yew recurve bow, named for the tips that curved away when the bow was strung. It was simple and looked homemade. Though I guess, in a sense, every weapon in BaS was homemade. Made by whom was the question. The bow I now owned was so basic that it was probably more useful to me if I deconstructed it for its materials.

“Can we still use these without some kind of archery skill?” asked Linc, pulling the string back and twanging it.

I nodded. “Sure, in the same way you could use one in real life – just because you haven’t practiced, doesn’t mean you physically can’t use it. Having a skill just increases your chances of scoring a hit and it increases the damage you’d do. It’s easier in BaS because you don’t need to learn the basic techniques. It’s like we discussed before – the game gives you a kind of fake muscle memory, and it’s boosted when you take a skill to the next rank.”

To test this, Linc nocked an arrow and aimed at a grunder corpse. His arrow went way over, but he seemed impressed. “I never fired an arrow in my life, but it felt natural. This game’s really something.”

With his next hit he stuck an arrow in the grunder’s belly, making its corpse wobble.

“Alright, alright,” said Hilly, yanking the arrow out and checking the tip, then wiping it on her shirt. She tossed it back to Linc. “Waste not want not.”

I was pleased with Linc’s thawing mood in regard to the game, and I nocked an arrow to show him how it was done. I had already done archery in real life. When I was a kid, my dad used to take me to Easter Park near our house, where they offered classes to under 10s. That basic knowledge didn’t add much to my in-game character technique wise, but it meant I felt a little more confident.

I nocked an arrow and pulled the bowstring tight and aimed at a grunder. Holding my breath, I released. My arrow flew on a true course toward it, before arcing right and sailing away.

“Closer, but still a shitshow,” said Hilly.

She readied an arrow. Squinting, she let loose. Her arrow thwacked into the wooden stick holding the grunder upright.

Shrugging, she said, “Guess none of us are Robin Hood right now.”

“What happened to waste not want not?”

“I’m only human. I had this urge to show the both of you up. Besides, as long as you don’t lose or break the arrow, it’s okay.”

“What’s the plan now?” asked Linc.

“I reckon we get as much wood as we can, and explore the area some more at the same time,” I said.

The three of us went into the woods and spent all day collecting wood. First, we combed the perimeter and collected every branch and every decent-sized stick, and we piled them up back at our base.

Next, I made a crude knife for myself, and we started cutting away vines to build up a hefty supply of them. Hilly, possessing an iron sword which she’d looted from grunders and then used to kill even more grunders, was more adept than Linc or me at cutting through the branches.

I quickly found that crude knives and axes made crappy hewing tools, and my arm started to tire by the time we had a decent supply.

Finally, we used our crude axes to chop away the biggest branches that our tools would allow. As a test, I tried cutting down a tree using a crude axe, but the tool fell apart after two strikes and it barely made a dent on the trunk.

Back at our base while I started working with the wood, Hilly and Linc went exploring.

“Got a hankering to stretch my legs,” said Linc. “Been a while since I had a good walk. In real life, I mean.”

“You a cripple or something?” said Hilly.

“If I was, you reckon that’d be the best way to ask me that?”

“Sorry. I’m not good with…you know…talking. I didn’t mean anything by it. I just mean, lots of folks play BaS for the sense of being able to walk again, with full immersion and stuff. Hear it’s used for physio, too. It doesn’t help physically, but it’s great for building up confidence. And that’s half the battle sometimes.”

Linc explained what had happened to him with the ‘fucking pothole’ - as he put it – and how he wasn’t going to be walking much further than his bathroom anytime soon.

“I ain’t gonna complain about us having a forager around. You know what my favorite part of BaS is?” she said.

“Killing stuff?”

“Nope. Grub. The fact that food in here tastes like food. I got a helluva sinus infection when I was a kid, and stuff just hasn’t tasted right since then. In here, though, no such problem.”

“You can’t taste at all?” I said.

“I can, but it's muted. Except for in BaS. The game gets around it. Stuff tastes great in here. I wanna eat some nice rabbit cooked over a spit.”

“Do we have to eat to stay alive in here?” said Linc.

“You really are the biggest noob in the world, aren’t you?” I said.

He shrugged. “They gave me a manual and I read it. Or I tried. But I’ve always been an outdoors kinda guy. Paying attention isn’t my strong point.”

“We don’t have to eat, but you can get buffs from it, so it’s worthwhile. And some foods restore health, too.”

“Plus things taste great,” said Hilly.

The two of them headed toward the woodland, quickly becoming tiny dots in the distance. Way over in the mountains, I saw movement. A few shapes scuttling over it, but they were way too far away to make out. It could have been some players crossing over it, or maybe NPC critters on some kind of pre-programmed patrol.

I reckoned at some point we’d all have to venture over to the mountains and spend a few days mining. There would be coal deposits near the surface, as well as metal ores hidden deeper. Eventually, we were going to need to construct things using metal, and it’d be great to supply ourselves rather than having to buy resources from merchants.

While they were gone, I opened up my improvisation menu. I was greeted with the same options as before - Crude axe, crude Bole, crude knife, crude spear, and crude hammer.

None of these were what I needed, but there was a way to fix that. According to the guides on Sheesh, ranking up in improvisation increased the options available. For most crafting classes, you could also buy craftprints that allow you to make stuff, subject to having the correct skill rank and materials.

For the next few in-game hours, I used my improvisation skill to instacraft lots of crude hammers, knives, and axes. Soon, I had so many that I could have equipped an army with them, as long as they didn’t mind knives that blunted quickly and axes that couldn’t wait to fall apart.

One thing that caught my attention was that even though the tools were all listed as crude, some were slightly better than others. One crude axe, for example, had a thicker handle than another and just looked more solid in general. I guessed that even within the [crude] category, there was variation in item quality.

Finally, after amassing a pile of the shoddy tools, I got a notification.

Skill leveled up: Improvisation

New rank: Novice

- Improvisation quality increased

- Improvision speed increased

- Improvisation options increased

*Reward gained: Crafting chest*

As well as earning me a rank increase in this individual skill, my use of improvisation had steadily been earning me general EXP. Right now, I was 80% toward earning level 2, at which point my attribute and total skill capability would increase.

As for becoming a novice in improvisation…well, it had various bonuses.

I tested it out by creating a crude axe. The timer that appeared as I was crafting went by much quicker. Not only that. The axe itself looked sturdier, and the stone edge that acted as a blade was sharper. Holding it, it felt a lot more secure now. I wouldn’t be able to fell a tree with it, but it was better at least. The new axe was listed in my inventory as an [improved] crude axe.

Leveling my improvisation also improved the selection of things that I could make. These included buckets, bowls, and even crude bedframes. I still needed the correct materials to make the things, of course. If I didn’t have the materials, then the improvisation options in my inventory were greyed out.

In my inventory was the crafting chest that I had gotten as a reward. I was used to getting reward chests from previous playthroughs of BaS. You usually got them for special events, such as leveling a skill for the first time, reaching a memorable level, or conquering a dungeon.

I dragged the chest from my inventory and set it on the ground. It was the size of a shoebox and had a flat, rectangular lid. It was also locked by a small padlock fastened over a latch, the type you might secure a garden shed with.

I yanked the padlock. The latch rattled. Turning in a circle, I saw no sign of a key.

Scratching my head, I stood for a moment and regarded the chest, wondering if I was going mad. Would the game really reward me with a chest that I couldn’t open? Was there something I was missing?

The only thing I could think was to use a hammer. Taking a [crude] hammer from my inventory, I started bashing the padlock. After eight swings my hammer fell apart.

“Damn it.”

I accessed my improvisation menu and crafted another hammer. Unlike the others, this new hammer came out as an [average] improvised hammer. The handle looked like it was made with something approaching competence, and the hammer head seemed kinda solid.

After a dozen blows with the new hammer, the padlock shattered, and I allowed myself a celebratory fist pump.

I opened the chest.

Craft Chest opened:

- 1 [mediocre] blacksmith hammer

- Crafter’s Gloves

- 500 nails

The blacksmith hammer and the nails were pretty obvious as to their purpose, but the crater’s gloves interested me. They were a deep tan leather and reached all the way up my forearm. The fingers were padded thicker than the rest, likely to avoid the accidents that occurred when you were working with hammers and metal all day.

When I put the gloves on, I got a notification:

Crater’s Gloves

- Crafting speed increased by 25%

Eager to try out my new skill rank and my new gloves, I got to work.

It was time to create something that resembled a building.

From the list, I selected ‘wooden panel.’ To create this, I needed five or more long wooden sticks and enough string to lash them together. In my improvisation menu, I could vary the number of sticks however I liked if I needed to create a bigger panel.

I created four panels to serve as walls, and then two more panels that could be slanted and become a roof. When these were ready, an option in my improvisation list was available.

Improvisation:

[Small] Wooden Hut

I created the hut. A timer appeared, and this one went so slowly that I minimized it on my screen and started looking up strategy guides on town building on the Blades and Sheesh website. Town building was a complex beast, and many factors decided whether a place failed or flourished.

A water supply was one of the key ones. Luckily, Sas had arranged for us to start close to a lake, and with two separate streams a little further to the east and west. We wouldn’t struggle for water. Nor would wood be a problem, with the forest not too far away. I reckoned at some point, Linc, Hilly, and I were going to have to go to the distant mountain, too, and collect stone and metal.

Your [Small] wooden hut is complete.

Warning: Inventory full

Lacking a bag or container of any kind, my starter inventory was comprised of sixteen squares. Six of them were taken up by some of the things that I had crafted, such as the crude axes and knives. The other ten were filed by the wooden hut, waiting to be placed.

One thing was clear – I was gonna need a better inventory system.

In any case, I had a hut to place. I set it within the borders marked by the grunder corpses strung up on wooden poles.

It was a small structure, a little taller than a garden shed and only a little bit wider inside. Stepping into it, I could stand without bending my neck, but only just. Still, after spending hours in a full immersion outside field, it was nice to be indoors. I almost hoped it would rain so I could hear it patter on the roof. No such luck – it was an annoyingly sunny day.

I had only been in there for a second when I got a notification:

Buff gained – Indoors [Minor]

- 1.5 speed health replenishment

This was new. I had never gotten a buff for standing indoors before. After thinking about it, I decided it must be because I was standing inside a structure that I built. Sure enough, a quick check online revealed that only the creator or owners of a property received a buff while standing inside them.

For the next few hours I got to work creating more huts. I had enough wood and vine string for three of them, with plenty of smaller pieces of firewood left over. I divided my time between waiting for my improvisation timer to run out on the huts, and using the VR notepad system to make a vague plan for what I needed to make next.

By the time Linc and Hilly returned it was night, which meant they’d been away for thirty real minutes. Linc rushed in excitedly, and he headed straight into a hut and clomped around in it.

He popped his head out of the doorway. “This is really mine?”

I nodded. “It’s just a crappy hut.”

“Sure, but it’s my crappy hut!”

Hilly approached me, taking in the sights of three wooden huts in the middle of nowhere, with grunder corpses nearby.

Linc left his hut. “So. You’ve been busy.”

“They aren’t much,” I said, “But at least we’ve met the requirements of having a group of buildings.”

“So this place is a hamlet now?”

“Not quite.”

On my menu system was a listing for ‘Property management’. When I accessed it, it showed me Hut A, Hut B, and Hut C. When I clicked on Hut A, I saw the following:

Hut A

Condition: 5/5

Owner: Unassigned

Designation: Unavailable.

Getting scored five out of five for something was usually great, but not in this case. Condition ratings went all the way up to ten thousand. Basically, my huts were a strong wind away from being blown to Oz.

As for the designation, the Sheesh guide told me that player-created buildings could be designated as shops, colleges, guilds. All kinds of things. You had to meet certain criteria to make that possible, and the structures themselves had to be made to a certain level of craftsmanship. Wooden huts made from untreated wood by a novice improviser couldn’t be designated as much other than ‘dwellings’.

Selecting the ‘owner’ tab, I was presented with three options – me, Linc, or Hilly. I chose myself. For huts B and C, I accessed the management system and changed the ownership status to Linc and Hilly.

When I assigned hut C, another prompt appeared.

You have satisfied the requirements for Hamlet – Level 1. Would you like to assign this location as a hamlet?

“Are you guys seeing this?” I said.

“Yup.”

Hilly nodded.

“Lemme just check the guide and see if there’s anything we need to know or we’re missing before I accept,” I said.

The guide on Sheesh had the following to say with regards to creating hamlets:

Once a player has satisfied the requirements for hamlet – Level 1, they will get a prompt asking them to finalize it. This can’t be undone, and the hamlet they create will become a location added to the BaS map.

It won’t show on the main map because only important places appear there. It will, however, appear on players’ minimap when they are close enough to the hamlet. The higher the level of the location, the stronger its ‘map signal’ will be.

If the player who creates a hamlet stops working on it or even deletes their game character, the hamlet will exist until it is claimed by another player. If it isn’t, the hamlet will ‘degrade’ and eventually wither into dust.

Players can only own one hamlet/town/city. If a party of players takes joint ownership, this limit still counts.

“Once we finalize this place,” I said, “We can’t make another one unless we dismantle it. I don’t wanna do a whole heap of work just to find out we placed our hamlet in the wrong place.”

“But you already set your huts here,” says Linc.

“They didn’t take much to make. I’d rather lose a few huts now if it means getting a better location.”

“Linc and I have explored some,” said Hilly. “This place is close to a travelers’ road which has links to a few towns and cities and forts nearby. There’s Dustpost, Westfell, Reenview. Some good trading links there.”

“Plus the lake will be good for fishing, and there’s plenty of game to hunt around here. Not to mention the herbs spread over the field and the woodland,” added Linc.

“What about the grunders?” I said.

Hilly made a dismissive motion with her hand. “Low level critters. I wouldn’t make any decisions with them in mind.”

“There’s also something else to consider,” said Linc. “The devs arranged for us to start here. I think this is where we’re supposed to build anyway, so any talk of moving is probably moot.”

“Then we’re settled on location. We just need a name.”

For the next ten minutes we each offered suggestions on names for our little settlement, only to be vetoed by one or both of the others. Linc kept offering the names he got from an internet generator, while I suggested variations of places in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. He was especially fond of the Shire. Hilly had a thing for western movies, and she suggested things like Tombstone and Yellow Rise and Dodge.

“We’re getting nowhere here,” I said. “Let’s just think about this. What kind of place do we want this to be?”

“We gotta build a town. That’s what Sas is paying us for.”

“Sure. But there are different kinds of towns in BaS. Dustpost is where you go for combat training and quests. Westfell is full of colleges. Reenview has tons and tons of all kinds of traders and crafters.”

“Can’t we just keep building?” said Linc. “What’s that saying? Build it and they will come?”

I shook my head. “I was reading a guide on Sheesh. For later hamlet and town levels, one of the criteria is having a certain number of folks visiting the town. That means we gotta make it appetizing. It also means we can’t keep the grunder corpses strung up. Especially when they start to rot. This place will start smelling like a crypt.”

“So we need a reason for players and NPCs to visit our little slice of BaS rather than the hundreds of other places in the game,” said Hilly.

“Exactly. Any ideas?”

When neither of them was forthcoming, I told them that I had a suggestion.

“I got an idea from both of you,” I said. “The way Linc was bumbling around, and how Hilly’s favorite thing about the game is the taste of the food. I think we should make a place for new players. Only, something different from the starter towns where you get quests to go kill rats and stuff. Some people play BaS because it’s an escape from reality, right? It’s a nice place to be. So I say let’s make this a place for new players to go, where they can relax and enjoy full immersion for what it should be – an escape.”

“You got a name for this little slice of digital heaven?” asked Hilly.

“I do, but maybe it’s stupid.”

“C’mon. I once visited a street in England called Butt Hole Road. It can’t be worse than that.”

“Okay then,” I said. “Welcome to Blade’s Rest.”

Chapter 6

Blade’s Rest

Population: 3

Later that night, Blade’s Rest was raided by grunders. I counted twelve of the child-sized vicious rats, wielding primitive swords and bows, dressed in black leather armor that made them look like scarab beetles.

They snuck up on us and surrounded us, and we only knew they were coming when I got stabbed in the back and received surprise attack damage.

I barely had time to grab a crude spear from my inventory before three of them surrounded me and started hacking at me with daggers that dripped with some kind of black slime.

Linc died shortly after me, while Hilly put up a better fight, using her iron sword to take out two of the creatures. Even she couldn’t hold out against a swarm. I was on a resurrection cooldown, so all I could do was watch from a bird’s eye camera view as the little bastards tore her apart.

With the three of us dead, the grunders rampaged around the hamlet, hacking the huts to pieces. Then, they took the grunder corpses down from the poles surrounding our hamlet. One grunder cocked his leg and urinated on the wreckage of our huts, laughing in a high-pitched squeal as he and his group scampered away into the night. They became black dots on an already darkened landscape, quickly disappearing from view.

Linc and I resurrected first. Hilly was a higher level and had died a little later, so she resurrected thirty seconds after us. The three of us stood there looking at the sorry wreckage of our hamlet.

I sifted through the debris, seeing which of my hut panels and pieces of wood and vine string could be salvaged and added back to my inventory for crafting. Each hut had cost me at least 25 pieces of wood and 100 vine strings to make, and less than 20% of that was salvageable now. The grunders had really done a number on us.

“Why didn’t the corpses stop them from attacking?” said Linc. “They were supposed to be a deterrent.”

“A 50% chance of a buff isn’t a guarantee. Besides,” said Hilly, “I got a look at them. They’d tied strips of cloth around their eyes so they couldn’t see the corpses. Since they’re grunders, I’m guessing they have no problems getting around by using their sight alone.”

“That’s…that’s pretty clever.”

“Anyway. Does this mean we lose hamlet status?” asked Hilly.

“Nope. The menu says I have 48 in-game hours to rebuild a group of huts.”

“Little assholes. Can’t believe they did that,” said Hilly.

Linc shrugged. “Kinda asking for it. If grunders strung up human corpses around their camp, any half-decent person who passed by would get pretty pissed off.”

“I say we train up, craft some better weapons, and go slaughter them,” said Hilly.

“I heard a wise man talking about revenge and battle once, and he said something that really opened my eyes.”

“What was it?”

“He said, ‘When two tribes go to war, a point is all that you can score.”

I paced around the hamlet ruins. Given that we only had three huts, it didn’t take long for me to complete my circuit.

“I say we rebuild Blade’s Rest back to its former glory. We make it stronger than it ever was.”

“Stronger than three huts?”

“Exactly.”

“Alright, well, I’m in charge of security,” said Hilly. “So this is on me. The grunder corpses should have deterred them, but I think it had the opposite effect. The grunders who killed us were ranked [elite]. I need to come up with a defense system that doesn’t involve corpses.”

Linc nodded. “That’d be nice. I’ll go gather resources.”

“I guess that leaves me rebuilding this place,” I said.

With the other guys gone, I rebuilt the huts. If I had the skill or resources I would have built better structures, but right now improvised huts were all that was available to me, and we at least needed some structures to make this place feel like a hamlet.

Opening my improvisation screen, I first strung together wooden poles and vine strings, creating the panels that would form our huts. With these made, an ‘improvised hut’ option became available. I created three of them.

I had thirty-six decent-sized pieces of wood available. When I say decent sized, they were actually classified as ‘medium’.

On my improvisation screen, these were available for crafting into [crude] spears. I crafted all of them and then spent a few game hours digging small holes around each hut and then driving spears into the ground, slanted with the sharp end poking outwards, forming a basic defense for each structure.

Using my improvisation skill didn’t rank it up, but it earned me general exp. With that, came something very welcome.

You have leveled up to 2

- 2 attribute points unlocked

- skill slot unlocked

The level up system in BaS was pretty simple to follow. For every level up you earned, you were given a corresponding number of attribute points to spend. If you reached level 3, you got 3 points. If you reached level 10, you got 10 points.

As well as that, each level up unlocked a skill slot, and you could only learn a new skill if you had enough spare skill slots. Some of the more advanced skills took up two or even three slots, but I didn’t have to worry about that for a long time.

Here was where it became interesting. Above the skill system, was the class system. There were tons of classes in the game, and each class had a list of compatible skills. If you collected 5 of these skills, you earned a class.

For example, the ‘ranger’ class could be unlocked by collecting any combination of the following skills: tracking, hunting, foraging, survivalism, cartography, exploration, animal handling, stealth, and many more.

Class slots unlocked every 5 levels. A player could collect classes, and activate them at will, often earning a big boost that otherwise wouldn’t have been available.

Finally, there were perks. You got them every three levels, so I was close to earning my first perk. Given that there were many ways of using skills to earn EXP, available perks were often tailored around whatever skills you used to level up.

For now, all I had to worry about was spending my attribute points. I’d already put some thought into this.

Without even talking about it, it seemed we’d all fallen into roles within our town. Hilly was in charge of our defense, Linc was the resource guy. I was the builder. Eventually, I was going to have to craft some complex things, and that meant learning high-level crafting skills and using complex design blueprints.

Knowing the attitude requirements for such things, I put my first two points into intelligence.

Intelligence increased to 3

- Crafting speed increased

- Crafting options increased

- Skill potential improved

Those three things weren’t the only things that had improved in my character. There was a whole load of under the hood improvements that happened every time you increased an attribute.

I had, for instance, probably increased my overall mana, even though mana wasn’t displayed in the user interface and I wasn’t a magic user. Regardless, it would have happened. I had also most likely improved my skilltome comprehension, my perception, my ability to solve puzzles. Maybe even my communication, which could help with taming animals, though I doubted I ever would. A whole bunch of stuff that I didn’t see.

All the game showed me, however, were the things that had improved the most and which were most relevant to the character build I was creating. BaS was very clever that way.

There was one more thing that increasing my intelligence was almost certain to have improved – my communication skills.

I opened Teamspeak and sent a message to the others.

Josh: Hamlet’s rebuilt. Gonna explore.

Hilly: Gotcha.

Linc: You won’t believe some of the flora I’m finding. This place is incredible.

I wandered south through the field of scutch grass that surrounded the bare bones of Blade’s Rest. There was a dim outline of a path running through parts of it, as though there had once been a carriage track here, and it had been neglected and now the field was claiming it back. The breeze in the air was cold, sure, but there was a midday sun too and its warming rays counteracted it and made it the kind of perfect temperature where just a slight change on either side of the thermometer would ruin it. As it was, I liked it and I started to think that this was a nice place to build a town.

Ten minutes’ walk took me to the giant lake. It was called Black Salt Lake. The water surface glittered under the morning sun, and ripples appeared here and there to indicate the presence of fish. Anglers were scattered around the banks. Some of them were human players and they were fishing alone.

There were a few reasons someone would spend time fishing in BaS. The first was the simplest – they wanted to make money. There would always be a fishmonger in a town near a lake who’d be willing to pay for trout and bream. Some players wouldn’t be interested in money at all and might be simply earning the fishing skill to add to a class. Then there was the third breed, which I identified with the most. They would be wearing full immersion VR goggles and sensory tabs, and they’d be fishing just for the sheer pleasure of standing at the bank of a sunny lake.

Nearby, groups of NPC fishermen stood together and cast out their lines. I approached one group of them - two men and a young boy. The tallest and oldest of the men wore a green cagoule with a giant hood that he wore up even though it wasn’t raining. The other man was short and pudgy and bespectacled, and he wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up to reveal the tattoo of an anchor on his forearm. The boy had on a straw hat to shield his head from the sun, and he had a small fishing rod in his hand. The men held bigger fishing rods, and they had metal bait tins by their feet, in which worms wriggled.

“Hello,” I said.

The taller man nodded at me and then focused his attention on his red float bobbing calmly on the lake surface. The other said, “Mornin’.”

The artificial intelligence in BaS was a mixed bag. At its top end, it was incredible, using the Turing 1.5 AI software to create characters that could understand what you were saying and offer contextual responses. Such AI was understandably a drain on the game’s resources, so it was generally reserved for the most important NPCs, such as those used in quests. Even these NPCs operated on an ‘if you can’t see me, I don’t exist’ kind of system. If no players were within fifty miles of the NPCs, they’d sort of shut down, and ceased drawing from the AI resources.

Other NPCs drew less on the Turing system, and as such their intelligence was a lot lower. You were unlikely to have a conversation with such folks. They might be able to answer questions such as ‘where’s the nearest inn’, but they wouldn’t have a dialogue on the advantages and disadvantages of increasing tax on imported salmon.

I reckoned the two fishermen and the boy would be way down on the scale, since they weren’t important NPCs. If anything they were decoration, here to add to the overall flavor of the game. I knew how to speak to such NPCs.

I used a trigger phrase which usually got an NPC talking.

“I have some questions,” I said.

“Sorry, stranger, but we’re busy,” said the tall, cagoule-wearing man.

Ah. I wasn’t expecting that.

“Ah, don’t be so tight, Atticus,” said the shorter man. Then he faced me. “What d’ya wanna know?”

A dialogue prompt appeared on my screen, listing options:

- Ask about the kinds of fish in the lake

- See if they have any fish for sale

- Ask about learning to fish

I already knew that, since this was a lake, there was likely a fishing hut nearby where I could purchase instruction in the fishing skill. Alternatively, I could buy a rod and then cast my line until I caught something, and learn the skill that way. Though BaS was immersive, it wasn’t quite as grueling as real life – I wouldn’t need to learn the real ins and outs of fishing in order to get the skill.

I wasn’t much interested in fishing right now in any case. I had two skill slots to spare, and I wasn’t going to fill one of them with fishing. Maybe Linc would like to do that. I’d talk to him about it later.

“Do you have any fish for sale?” I said.

The grumpier man, Atticus, nodded. “Maybe we could spare some, if you got the coin.”

This brought up a barter menu. On the left side of the screen was my inventory, filled with lots of crude knives, axes and the like. Although I only had sixteen slots, I had way more than sixteen tools. This was because items were grouped together and stacked. Crude axes took up one slot for instance, even though I had dozens of them.

On Atticus’s side of the window were all the uncooked fishes that he had for sale. There were sunfish, perch, bass. Each of them had the property of restoring health to various degrees. The sunfish offered the biggest health boost.

“I think I’ll leave it for now,” I said.

The window closed.

“Suit yourself,” said the man.

The NPCs would likely be programmed to be here at this time every day, which was good to know in case we needed to urgently buy some fish to restore our health. Fish could be eaten raw in BaS, but would offer better benefits if they were cooked. And on that score, anyone could cook things in BaS. You could learn it as a skill and cook things better so that you got more stat-benefits from your food, but it was still a skill that anyone could use without committing to a slot.

Heading off on my travels, I skirted around the lake, passing occasional players who were too involved in their fishing to notice a level two noob like me. One guy had two buckets next to him, and one was filled to the brim with lake crabs.

Soon I came to a wooden hut, where a sign read ‘Jessop’s Bait and Tackle.’ Just as I’d guessed, that would be where a player could learn the basic fishing skill quickly if he had enough coin. I didn’t go inside.

From the lake, a walk south took me into a stretch of yellowed grass which looked drained and brittle, like the vitality had been sucked out of this part of the map. My shoddy leather boots crunched on it, and every so often I saw a bone laying here and there. They looked like they belonged to long-dead critters.

My hackles started to rise. I knew a mob area when I saw one.

Sure enough, I spotted a wolf in the distance. Wolves were typical starter mobs, way less ferocious than their real-life counterparts. Even a level 2 crafter like myself should be able to take care of one. The problem would come if they were programmed with a pack mentality, where fighting one wolf would draw the attention of any others in the vicinity.

This beast was on its own and it was far enough away that I wouldn’t trigger a fight. Even so, I stayed still for a minute. As I did, red dots appeared here and there on my mini map, indicating the presence of other wolves scattered over the yellow plains. My improved intelligence had probably helped me discover them, since perception was an under-the-hood stat that came under intelligence.

I headed just a little further south across the dry landscape until I saw fences in the distance. Getting a little closer, I saw that they were seven feet tall fences made from wood tied together by vine rope, and they formed a perimeter around a grunder village.

There was a boulder to my right, sunk into the ground. Climbing it gave me a viewpoint so I could see over the grunders’ fences.

The grunders had twelve huts in their village. Round, solid-looking structures with clay walls and domed roofs made from thatched hay. Looking at them, I got a serious case of hut-envy. These were less like the garden sheds of Blade’s Rest and more like proper domiciles. They looked like they’d withstand a battering.

Josh: Can you guys meet me here?

I placed a custom marker on my map for Hilly and Linc to see. The grunder village had also marked itself on my world map as a discovered location. It was listed as Chief Oak’s Clan.

Hilly: I’m a little busy. What’re you doin’ down there?

Josh: I found the grunder village.

Hilly: So?

Josh: It’s a helluva lot better than ours. But I have a plan. Just meet me down here, it won’t take long.

Hilly arrived five minutes later, where she found me crouched on the ground so that I was partially hidden by the yellow grass. She joined me.

“Here,” she said.

She threw a fur chestpiece on the ground, as well as an iron dagger with a wooden grip. The chestpiece was a piece of armor designed to protect the front of your body, though fur was low down on the list of desirable armor materials. I slipped the chestpiece over my head and then adjusted it using straps that went around my shoulders. A notification told me that my defense had increased. I held the dagger in my right hand.

“Thanks.”

“Killed a couple of wolves on the way here,” said Hilly, “And they dropped those.”

“You could have sold ‘em, you know.”

“I know. Share and share alike, I say. We’re a team.”

“Appreciate it.”

Linc arrived soon after. He was wearing a ridiculous Davy Crockett style fur hat and he had a burlap pouch tied to his belt by string. When Hilly and I laughed at him, he gave us a twirl.

“Looking good, huh?” he said.

“You’re looking…uh…special,” said Hilly.

“There was a hunter NPC in the woods. He was looking for deer and I told him where I’d seen one. He gave me the hat and the pouch as thanks. It ain’t much, but it adds a dozen slots to my inventory. And boy, do I need it. Did I mention how many cool plants and herbs there are in this place?”

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” said Hilly. “Wait until you leave Gobbler’s Creek.”

“Anyway, why were we summoned, your highness?” said Linc, looking at me.

“So the grunder village is over there, okay?” I said, pointing.

“We aren't gonna attack them, are we?”

“Nah, we’d get killed. But look at their huts. See how much better they are than ours? I want to make something like that. What I need is for us to kill a few grunders and then let me loot them. The game drops loot according to your skills. I checked on Sheesh. If we kill enough of them and I’m the one who does the looting, there’s a chance they’ll drop craftprints for the huts.”

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” said Hilly. “I’ll do most of the killing, and you do the looting?”

“It’ll be for the good of the hamlet. That’s the goal, after all. Besides, the better a building is, the better buffs you get when you’re inside it. So you’ll benefit from this just as much as me.”

“Okay. Fine. But we better work out a loot system going forward. If I’m doing most of the killing for us, I want most of the loot.”

I looked at Linc, who shrugged as if to say he was okay with it.

I spat on my hand and stuck it out. “Deal.”

Hilly spat on hers.

Linc shook his head. “You guys are disgusting.”

“It’s only a game…”

We were waiting for two game hours before the grunder village gates opened and a party of them headed into the fields. There were seven of them, which seemed like a lot. Then again, grunders were on par with wolves in terms of difficulty. The three of us would be okay. We’d only died during the last attack because a) they’d snuck up on us and b) they were [elite] grunders.

My online research of grunders told me that they got a bonus for close combat, due to their claws and teeth. As such, I put my new dagger in my inventory, and I readied a crude spear so that I could fight with a longer reach. I gave another spear to Linc. Hilly thanked me but stuck with her sword.

The pack of grunders headed east from their village. We gave them some leeway, before heading off after them. We cut a wide arc through the field, keeping distance while slowly maneuvering ourselves behind them.

Moving this way, it was five minutes until we were completely behind them.

Hilly said, “Ready?”

“Yup.”

“Let’s get this over with so I can go foraging,” said Linc.

“Okay then. Get ready to grind some grunders.”

Hilly was the strongest and fastest of us. Not by a great deal, but her extra two levels showed. She must have put points into agility as well as in strength because she reached the grunders before we did, swinging her sword into one of them and cleaving it in half.

Linc and I approached from the flanks, Linc going left and me turning right. Armed with our spears, we charged at the creatures and, in a pincer formation, forced them to fall back into a compact group.

While Hilly hacked at them and Linc and I thrust our spears into their sides, the grunders had too many areas to defend against. In a few seconds, all of them were lying dead on the ground, bodies piled atop one another.

The battle gave me some EXP, but I didn’t level up yet. A prompt asked me if I wanted to learn [basic] spear fighting, but I declined even though I had a spare skill slot. I was going heavy on the crafting side of things, and I didn’t need a combat skill muddying that.

“Off you go then,” said Hilly. “Get looting.”

As I approached the grunders, a snarl caught my attention. I turned around to see a wolf launching itself at Hilly. She lifted her sword to block it but she was too late. The surprise attack must have given her a stun debuff, because she didn’t get up straight away.

Three more wolves appeared around us, heads hunched low and leg muscles tensed and ready to leap at us. Their snarls carried over the breeze, and their white fangs glinted sharp and bright under the afternoon sun.

Two of them pounced on Linc and brought him down to the ground straight away. I was going to help him, but a third wolf caught my peripheral vision.

I turned toward it, robbing it of its surprise attack. As it leaped at me, I dropped to a crouch and held the spear at an angle. The beast crashed into the spear tip which pierced a hole in its chest and then snapped off, leaving me with what was now just a long stick.

The wolf hit the dirt and rolled. It tried to get to its feet but then gave up and whimpered.

Running toward Linc, I saw that Hilly was back on her feet. She slaughtered two wolves by herself. I reached Linc and started whacking the wolves with my stick, though it wasn’t meant as a bludgeoning weapon and the damage it gave was tiny. Hilly soon joined me, hacking at the beasts until they were dead.

Unfortunately, Linc was also deceased.

“Sucks for him,” said Hilly. “Well, go loot your grunders. The wolf corpses are mine.”

Chapter 7

Being low level mobs, the grunders didn’t drop much in the way of loot. Mostly just the loincloths that covered their groins, which I had no interest in taking. Unlike the elite grunders that had attacked our hamlet, these ones didn’t use weapons so there was little to loot on that score. It was a little disappointing.

“Don’t you find it strange?” I asked Hilly, “That these guys didn’t have any weapons?”

“Maybe they’re too stupid.”

“Don’t reckon so. Look at their settlement – they’ve got some organization here.”

Hilly rested her chin in her hand and thought about it. “Then the ones we ambushed were either scouts or foragers, and they weren’t ready for a fight.”

If this was true, their society lived on a hunter-gatherer system, but they didn’t have enough hunters to spare any to guard the gatherers.

“I don’t reckon we’ll need to worry about reprisals,” I said.

“The only thing you need to worry about is getting those corpses looted.”

After checking most of their corpses, I found four silver coins, 1 gold, and 38 coppers. I put the coins into my inventory, planning to share them with Hilly and Linc later.

“Any luck?”

“Nothing so far,” I said.

I was about to chalk this up for a failure when I looted the last grunder corpse. In its grisly remains, I found a rolled-up parchment.

My pulse quickened. I picked it up and opened it.

The parchment was old and stained with the crude ink that had been used to draw on it. Depicted on the sheet was a rounded hut with a thatched roof, with arrows pointing to the most important structural aspects of it. Drawn next to it were symbols representing wood, clay bricks, and hay, showing what was needed to build it.

Craftprints learned:

Clay Hut

A simple structure that affords protection from the elements and offers better defense than more basic wood-and-vine huts.

“Got it!” I said.

“A craftprint?”

“Yup.”

Having the clay hut craftprint meant I could build something a little sturdier than wooden panels leaning up against each other. We’d need to get some clay, but that wouldn’t be much of a problem.

“I’ll loot the wolves and then we’ll make tracks,” said Hilly.

I was ready to head back to the hamlet, when I noticed a gleaming yellow notification in the left corner of my screen.

When I clicked on it, a bell chimed.

Level up!

I saw that fighting the wolves had leveled me up to level three, giving me three attribute points to spend and unlocking another skill slot.

I supposed I had Hilly to thank for that, since she did most of the killing. She had probably earned most of the experience, while the small amount of damage I had done to the grunders had at least earned me something.

With three attribute points to spend, there was no need for careful consideration. I knew BaS, and I knew the class I was aiming for. I wanted to be a builder, and that meant I would rely less on strength and more on my other attributes.

I loaded one into agility, and two into intelligence.

As well as a notification telling me how my intelligence had improved, I received one for agility.

Agility Increased:

- Hand-eye-coordination improved

- Crafting speed increased

- Hand dexterity improved

This was interesting. If Hilly put her points into agility, she’d probably get a boost in her dodge ability, or maybe her sword precision would get better. Whereas my agility increases were ones that tied into my improvisation skill, in a way.

If I had accepted the spear fighting skill, then my agility boosts would probably have been split between that and improvisation. This was why it was so important not to accept whatever skill came your way. I had done that on my first BaS playthrough, and I ended up with a mess of a character.

Boosting my intelligence gave me the same increases as before – improvements in my crafting speed and so on.

The best part of the level up notification came last.

You have earned 1 perk. Please choose a perk.

I opened up the perk list. This being a level 3 perk, there wasn’t a great deal to choose from, and all of them related to crafting. There was a perk that allowed me one instantaneous craft per day, for instance, subject to the designs being no better than [crude]. Another perk improved my crafting speed if I was indoors.

It was difficult to know which one to pick, since I could only take one perk, and I wouldn’t unlock another slot until level six. Damn my frugal nature.

The best was a perk called ‘Improviser Artificer’.

Improvisor Artificer

Add one [weak] elemental property to your crafting creations.

Checking Sheesh, I saw the Improvisor Artificer perk explained in more detail.

First, any magical item in the game could be taken to an artificer, who would strip that magic effect away from the item, leaving it intact for future use. The magic would be represented as essence.

For example, the red healing plant that Linc had given me. An artificer could strip the ‘healing’ property from the plant. This healing essence could then be used for other things, while the leftover plant was mostly useless, unless it could be eaten or used to make tea.

For me, the Improvisor Artificer perk meant I could apply essences to something I was crafting, kinda like adding an ingredient to a recipe. Whatever I was crafting would then have some kind of effect based on the essence I used.

It was a lot to take in, just reading it like that, but most things in BaS were easier to understand in application than in theory. In short, though, I reckoned this was a useful perk to have once I had enough money to buy essences from an artificer.

Perk gained: Improvisor Artificer

Linc had respawned back at the hamlet, though he wasn’t waiting for us there when we got back. Predictably, he was way across the grassy field, inspecting something on the ground.

Josh: We’re back.

Linc: Be one minute.

One minute for Linc meant fifteen minutes for the rest of us. The rest of us being, people who live and operate in standard earth time. A Linc unit of time was slightly different.

“Evening,” said Hilly.

Linc looked up at the sky. “It’s still afternoon…oh. I get it. Sorry. I saw a few things to forage on the way. The scutch grass field is full of bernickles.”

“That doesn’t mean the same thing to us as it does to you, Linc.”

“Oh. Right. Well, Bernickles can be brewed in a tea that replenishes your health over time when you drink it.”

“That’s actually gonna be handy,” I said.

“Well, I try. How’d it go with the looting?”

We told him that we’d killed all the grunders and the wolves and found a clay hut blueprint. He was less than enthusiastic about it, but I didn’t take offense. Building wasn’t his thing. He loved to forage. I was the one who got excited about making stuff, whereas I was less enthused about finding a new rare leaf or something.

“C’mon, then, Survivor Jones,” said Hilly. “What did ya get?”

I shot Hilly a look.

“What?” she said.

“We don’t talk about Survivor Jones.”

“No we don’t,” agreed Linc. “The fraud. Anyway, I’ve got a bag full of shrooms, berries, roots, and plants,” Linc said, “and my foraging isn’t good enough to identify all of ‘em yet. I’ll have to work on leveling it.”

“Hilly? What’ve you got planned?”

“I’m gonna head to Westfell and sell these wolf pelts. It’s not far away. Linc, you can tag along if you like.”

“Eh, towns and stuff aren’t my thing. Even in a game.”

“There’ll be folks in town who can edify all your mulch for you.”

“It ain't mulch…but I guess that sounds good. Josh? Are you coming?”

“I’m gonna stay here and work on the hamlet,” I said.

When the two of them were gone, I got to work. First, I created ten [crude] shovels. This might have seemed like overkill, but I was beginning to learn that crude tools didn’t last long when you used them. The crude shovels were everything you’d expect – long sticks with roughly carved handles and flatted stones on the end for shoveling, kept together by vine string.

For a few game hours, I dug holes in the fields surrounding the hamlet. I was looking for clay. It took a few attempts to find some, but I hit on a fairly rich patch down near the lake. I shattered eight of my ten shovels during my digging, but I ended up with 99 ‘lumps’ of clay in my inventory. These took up one slot, with 99 being the limit before I’d have to use a new slot. I reckoned 99 was enough.

After a day of this I was coated in sweat, and my shirt was stuck to my back. Luckily, clothes in BaS had a self-cleaning effect, where over time, old stains would disappear. Much to the relief of the fanbase, that included odors, too. In BaS’s early days, stains, dirt, and smells had stuck to clothes until you washed them, resulting in a full immersion world where players avoided each other because of the smell. That, obviously, wasn’t so good for an MMO game, so the devs removed the feature.

Next, I headed to the yellowed grass near the grunder village for some reconnaissance, taking care to stay well clear of any wolves or stray grunder scouting parties. There was some activity over at the village, where a pack of grunders was dragging the bodies of the ones we’d killed across the field and through their village gates.

I ducked down low and stayed still. I counted to fifty in my head, then slowly rose above the grass stalks to peek out. The grunders were gone, and their village gates were shut.

Finally, I headed back to the hamlet, where I was surprised to see the fisherman and the boy waiting for me. I recognized Atticus, the taller one, but I didn’t know the names of the other two.

It was strange to see the NPCs away from the lake. I’d assumed they were very low-level Ais that wouldn’t stray from their turf.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“Just watching,” said Atticus.

“Watching what?”

“Don’t mind us.”

In real life, this would have been an ‘I’m calling the cops’ kinda situation. Not so in BaS. Sure, it was strange that the NPCs wanted to watch me, but I wasn’t worried. Human NPCs rarely ever attacked players, and when they did, it was part of a quest.

Even so, full immersion made it a little unnerving to have the fishermen watching me work. I positioned myself so they were in my peripheral vision, where I could keep an eye on them without looking at them all the time.

Trying to ignore them, I started on the clay huts. A clay hut could actually be made with most types of mud, but clay was the best. Unlike the wood and vine huts I had made earlier, clay huts had solid walls. I never thought I’d be happy to just have a place with solid walls, but I guess that was hamlet life for you.

In my menu system, there was a new tab next to ‘Improvisation’. This one was called ‘Craftprints’. So far, only the huts were listed but it would fill up when I looted or bought more points.

“What are ya doin’, mister?” said the boy.

“Hush now, Billy. Let the man work.”

Still ignoring them, I selected ‘clay hut’. A silhouette of a hut appeared on my display. There were twelve empty squares overlaid on it. Four on the roof, and eight on the main rounded structure.

From my inventory, I dragged eight lumps of clay and four bundles of the yellow grass. With each crafting square filled, I selected ‘begin construction.’

A timer appeared on my screen, and it looked like it would take a while. I minimized it and wandered over to the NPCs.

They were staring over my shoulder, at something behind me.

Glancing back, I saw that my clay hut was already taking shape. The basic structure was there, and it was filling out more and more as the timer turned.

“It’s building by itself!” said Billy.

“That’s right. I’m a wizard,” I said, “And I’m building a jail to lock you up in.”

“No!”

The shorter man laughed and ruffled Billy’s hair. “He’s just kidding with you, soft lad.”

“What is this place?” said Atticus.

For a moment, I was surprised.

This question was my second clue that Atticus, the other fella, and little Billy had moved up a notch in the Turing system. The first clue was the fact that they were here in Blade’s Rest.

BaS was a dynamic game, and a combination of my hamlet building and my earlier conversation with them must have caused the system to give them better AI. This happened fairly often, but it always amazed me to see how far we’d come in terms of AI and digital personalities. There were many NPCs in BaS who you would honestly think were human players, if they didn’t have NPC tags above their heads.

Even though Atticus and his companions had been given a boost, they wouldn’t be at the top of the AI ladder, and it was still a case of saying the right things to them. They weren’t perfectly intelligent – if I asked them what they wanted for their birthdays, they wouldn’t reply. Their AI was still nowhere near the top levels that BaS was capable of.

“Do you have a quest for me?” I said.

Atticus shook his head.

Mentioning quests was another trigger word with NPCs, and I was surprised that it hadn’t worked. If they didn’t have an AI generated quest for me, then what were they doing here?

“Alright, so what can I do for you?” I tried.

“I’m Atticus, and this is little Billy, and this fella here is my brother, Argyle.”

“Pleased to meet you all.”

“We love fishing,” said Argyle.

“Right…”

“All kinds of fishing. Fly fishing, angling, jigging. We just love to catch fish.”

“Is this going somewhere?” I said.

“Going somewhere?”

Damn it. I’d confused the AI.

“So you love fishing. What can I do for you?”

“Well, stranger,” said Atticus, “Fishing gets us out of the house every day, and that’s how us and our wives like it. Only, we can’t fish in winter. Gets too cold. So for a whole season, we ain’t got an excuse to get out.”

“We want you to build us a shack,” said Argyle.

“Down by the lake?”

“Yup.”

This wasn’t a quest, then. More of a mini-quest. These popped up a lot in BaS. It was going to detract a little from building Blade’s Rest, so there would have to be something in it for me.

“What are you going to give me in exchange?”

“For the gift of giving us the ability to fish all year round?” said Argyle. “That’s priceless. But we’ll give ya 20 gold and a spare rod, tackle, and some bait.”

Twenty gold wasn’t much in the scheme of things, but for a low-level player it was a decent chunk of change. Right now the only funds I had were the coins I’d looted from the grunders. As a builder, money was going to be harder to come buy at first because I wouldn’t be completing the kinds of fighting quests that came with rewards.

Then again, maybe this was the game’s way of evening it out for me.

“Fifty gold,” I said.

Atticus looked at Argyle. I waited, knowing that right now, the game would be measuring my bartering ability against theirs. Bartering was a skill, but there was also a hidden bartering stat that came under the umbrella of intelligence.

“Thirty,” said Atticus.

“Forty, and I’ll move your project to the top of my queue. I have a lot of building jobs lined up, you know.”

“Done.”

I told them that I would swing by the lake the next morning and build the shack for them. Only, when I said this, they didn’t leave.

“Uh…is that all?” I said.

“We’d like ya to build the shack now.”

“Right now?”

“No time like the present.”

“I’ve got stuff of my own to be doing,” I said. “I’ll be there tomorrow morning, and that’s that.”

Atticus gave me a stern look. “You drive a hard bargain, stranger. Fine. Seventy gold if ya do it right now.”

I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to earn an extra thirty gold for something I’d already agreed to do. Accepting the offer, I dutifully accompanied Atticus, Argyle and Billy down to the lake. It was starting to get dark now, and I knew that grunders would begin patrolling further afield once the sun had set. I’d need to get this done quickly.

They led me along the lake bank, to the exact spot where I had seen them fishing earlier. The grass of the bank was well-worn by their boot prints.

“Here we go,” said Atticus.

“Right here?”

“I’d be obliged.”

“I’ll set it back just a little,” I said. “If the bank gets muddy in winter, the whole thing would be unstable.”

“You’re the builder.”

Even as we spoke the night grew darker, prompting me to want to get back to the relative safety of Blade’s Rest. Luckily, I wasn’t building a shack the old-fashioned way.

“You realize that this won’t be some kind of fancy lodge?” I said.

“We just want something to keep us warm and dry.”

“Dry, I can do. Warm? Maybe not.”

“Just walls and a roof please, fella.”

Using my improvisation skill, I quickly constructed a ten-by-ten wooden shack, weaving the wooden walls tightly together using vine rope. It took maybe a few minutes.

I paced around the finished product.

It was nothing special. It looked like the kind of huts that bird watchers sometimes sat in when deep in woodland and trying to catch sight of a rare tit or thrush. It was better than shivering out in the cold, though.

“Well?” I said.

Atticus headed inside and strolled around. There wasn’t much room to stroll, so I knew he must be inspecting it. When he came out, he didn’t seem completely unsatisfied, at least.

“A little basic,” he said.

“Pay basic prices, get a basic product.”

“Does that mean you can make improvements?” said Argyle.

I couldn’t. Not right now. But I knew I would be able to as I leveled up my skill and found more craftprints.

“Sure, when I have time and you have coin.”

Atticus nodded. “Alright, then. Here’s your gold, as promised. We’ll be callin’ on ya when we want this place sprucing up.”

Items added to inventory:

- 70 gold

- 1x [mediocre] fishing rod

- 50x bait worms

“Thanks,” I said.

“Pleasure. Nice to meet ya, Josh Builder.”

I couldn’t be bothered explaining that I wasn’t from around here, and my surname didn’t match my occupation, like most folks. Instead, I gave them a wave and headed back to Blade’s Rest.

Linc and Hilly still hadn’t returned by the time I was back at the hamlet, which I was thankful for. I was equally thankful for the clay hut that had finished construction, and was sitting proudly in the center of the hamlet. Its walls were solid, its roof tightly thatched to keep out the rain.

Stepping inside, it had a distinctly earthy smell. Even so, it had the feel of a proper indoor roof. There was no draught, no cold. But not only that.

Buff gained: Indoors [Average]

- 5x speed health replenishment

That was a much better buff than the one I received when standing inside an improvised hut. I was happy with my decision to rebuild using clay.

Free from distractions, I completed three more clay huts. It took maybe twelve game hours, and the morning sun was casting red splashes across the sky by the time I was done.

With four clay huts in total, Blade’s Rest looked at least little more impressive than it had a day earlier.

When Hilly and Linc got back, Linc was carrying three dead rabbits tied together by string and slung over his shoulder, while Hilly was dragging along a dead deer.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I knew Hilly planned on hunting for food from time to time, but I never imagined she’d drag back a whole deer after her first expedition.

Linc waved to me. “Hey, Josh.”

Grunting, Hilly said, “A little help, Survivor Jones.”

Heading over to join them, I helped her drag the deer into the hamlet, where we placed it in the center of the four huts.

“We’re gonna be eating tonight,” Hilly said.

Standing with her hands on her hips, she looked at the clay huts.

“You like 'em?” I asked.

“Like them? This is almost as good as my house!” said Linc. “I mean, it’s not. Not really. But still.”

I laughed. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, in any case.”

That night, I built a clay firepit in the middle of the hamlet. Hilly butchered the deer, while Linc took care of the rabbits. At their request I crafted a clay cauldron for Linc and a clay oven for Hilly.

Separately, they each prepared dish for us to eat. Linc used the rabbit, which he scolded in the cauldron, along with a bunch of veggies and herbs that he’d foraged and identified. Soon, the air was scented with rabbit meat mingled with rosemary and basil.

“Now that I know which herbs around here are poisonous and which aren’t,” he said, while holding a bucket, “I can make us a stew.”

“Where’d you get the bucket?”

“Westfell.”

“Alright. And where are you headed with it?”

“Just to the lake,” he said.

He returned twenty minutes later with a bucket full of water, which he poured into the cauldron and started boiling. He added it to the rabbit meat, herbs, and veggies, and then left it simmering to turn it into a broth.

“Need any help?” I said.

“I’m good. You just take a load off.”

I wasn’t good with just sitting around doing nothing. Never had been, though from time to time I’d tried to get better at that by meditating. Forcing myself to clear my mind, I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the land around Blade’s Rest. The owls hooting. The wind groaning through the trees in the woods northwest.

Didn’t work. I wasn’t relaxed enough. So, I brought up my browser and checked out some town planning guides on the Blade and Sheesh website.

When the stew had been simmering for long enough Linc started adding spring onion and wild garlic and other herbs that he produced from his foraging pouch, sipping the broth every few minutes to gauge the taste. He looked like a scientist to me, tasting the broth and then adding tiny pinches of basil and oregano until he got it just right.

Hilly, meanwhile, simply cut up the deer, chopped the meat into pieces, and stuck them in the clay oven to roast. As a final flourish, she produced from her inventory a mini barrel of beer that she’d bought in their trip to Westfell.

“Beer?” she offered. “We didn’t get mugs, so you’ll have to drink out of the barrel.”

“Pass it over here,” I said.

“Grubs up,” announced Linc. “Hope you’re hungry!”

That night, we sat around the fire pit with our salted deer meat and our rabbit stew and our beer. It tasted divine, and the heat from the pit was just right.

Starting with Linc, we told each other a little more about our lives outside the game, and I had the best night that I could remember having for a long time.

Chapter 8

Real-life intruded soon after, and the three of us logged off. I had given Linc and Hilly my cell number, and that evening – real-life evening – he texted me telling me that ‘bloody Survivor Jones is on every other channel, it seems like’ and asking if I could recommend anything to watch. I told him I was more of a reader, unfortunately. Hilly, who was added to the group, told us to watch Blood Soup, which was some kind of zombie show that had just started streaming.

The next time that the three of us logged on to BaS together, we found four NPCs waiting in Blade’s Rest. They were standing beside the vacant hut that I had made.

“The hell?” said Hilly, equipping her sword.

“Steady on,” I said.

“Who are these guys?”

There was a huge man who wore a leather apron over a white shirt, and he was standing next to an equally huge woman. In fact, she might have been a little bit bigger than him. Their children, two boys, were also big, and it was hard to gauge how old they were. Either way, there was giant blood in this family somewhere down the ancestral lines.

Despite their size, I didn’t pick up on any threats from them. An NPC was unlikely to attack a player unprovoked unless they were mobs, and a family was even less likely to do so.

This helped me relax and take them in a little better. With them they had a mule who was looking yearnfully at the fields of grass, as well as an open cart laden with what looked like all their belongings. They had crates filled with clothes, others filled with brass pans. Lots and lots of jars. And then there were metal lockboxes.

Drawing her sword, Hilly charged at the family.

Linc lurched after her, but missed, and slipped onto the ground. I helped him up.

As Hilly approached the huge man pulled a hammer off his cart, but his wife took a step in front of him.

“Think twice, little girl,” said the woman.

Hilly’s charge petered out, and she lowered her sword.

“You,” said the huge man. “This is village of your, yes?”

His accent was a strange one. Many city NPCs spoke in a kind of queen’s English ‘proper’ tone. Whereas this man had a definite foreign tint to his accent. Then again, in the digital game world, who was to say which of us were the foreigners?

Hilly glanced at Linc and me, and then back at the woman.

“This isn’t quite a village yet. But it is our hamlet. Yeah,” said Linc.

The woman pointed at the fourth hut. “Is not belonging to anybody, yes?”

Ah. Now I understood.

When I created the four clay huts, I had assigned one to Hilly, Linc, and I. This made them ‘player dwellings’, which meant that others couldn’t enter. It was useful to do this because it meant we each had a place where we could put some of our inventory without it being looted.

I had intended the fourth hut to be a jointly owned storehouse, but maybe there was an opportunity here.

“What do you wanna know about the hut?” I said.

The huge man stepped out from his wife’s shadow and raised his hammer and shook it in the air.

“I kill girl if she raises sword again!”

“You will not kill, Gorgal. Do not be a silly.” Then, she addressed us with a smile. “I am Frenrita and this is Gorgal. My children are Hanz and Franz. We are, saying in your language, helpers of murder.”

Hilly lifted her sword. “You’re helpers of murder?”

“Is the wrong word?” said Frenrita.

“I reckon it might just possibly be. What do you mean?”

“Gorgal. Show him.”

Grumbling, Gorgal took a step toward Hilly. He was so big that his boots looked bigger than anvils. I reckoned he must have to get them custom made. His hair was balding but the beard on his face was flourishing, a jungle of brown touched by grey that hid half of his face.

Gorgal held the hammer horizontally across his palms. “With this I make the weapons for the killing.”

“Ah. You’re a blacksmith.”

“Smith of the black. Yes.”

Frenrita patted the clay hut walls with her shovel-like hands. “We will offer the gold for this hut. And if you build bigger one, we will set up workshop.”

“You want to live here in Blade’s Rest?”

“No, not just live. Live and work. We will give ten of the percent of gold we make from death tools.”

Gorgal said something to Frenrita. I didn’t understand their language, but his grumbling tone was clear enough. Frenrita said something in rebuke, and then it seemed like the matter was settled.

“As I say. Ten of the percent for our work here. And for hut, we will pay one hundred-gold.”

“Let me speak to my…associates for a minute.”

“Yes,” said Frenrita. Then to Franz and Hanz she said, “Take Patti to grass. She needs to eat.”

“Yes, mother,” said the boys in unison.

The boys dutifully untied the mule from the cart and led the animal to the fields, where she began eating.

Hilly, Linc, and I walked a little away from the family, until we were sure they couldn’t hear us. Which was ridiculous given that they were NPCs, but that was the thing with full immersion – you started feeling like you were really there.

“What do you reckon?” I said.

“To what?”

“Their offer, obviously.”

“I reckon no,” said Hilly. “I thought we were gonna talk about how best to get rid of them.”

“Why wouldn’t you want them here?”

“I just don’t like the look of that guy. The last thing we need is a mad NPC hanging around the place.”

“Linc?” I said.

Linc thought about it. “We are building a town, after all. One of the later requirements is to have a blacksmith.”

“You’ve been reading up on it?”

Linc nodded.

“Even so. We don’t need a blacksmith yet,” said Hilly.

“No, but why pass up the opportunity?”

“I just don’t like the idea of selling this guy a house and then we can’t kick him out.”

I didn’t see any threat from the family, but I didn’t want to contradict Hilly as head of hamlet defense. Even so, I agreed with Linc on this. We would need a blacksmith later, so why not just get it done now, since a blacksmith was here on our doorstep?

The problem was, however, saying this without putting Hilly’s nose out of joint.

“How about this,” I said. “We counter their offer. Tell them we’ll rent them a couple of huts, but we won’t sell them outright. That way, we get a regular income while having the services of a blacksmith in Blade’s Rest.”

“Alright. Fine. But the mule stays in the field,” said Hilly.

“What? What’ve you got against mules?”

“One of my classmates got kicked by one on a field trip back in high school. I haven't trusted them since.”

“Ah, Hill. Mules are great creatures,” said Linc. “They’re clever, loyal, affectionate. You just gotta show them respect, and always stay in front of ‘em. Never behind.”

“I’ll go talk to them,” I said.

Hilly nodded. “And, you know. Check out the mule. See how vicious it is.”

We made a deal with Gorgal and Frenrita, leasing them one clay hut for 100 gold per week. I agreed to build a bigger hut to serve as a blacksmith’s workshop. That would cost 200 per week. Gorgal grumbled and Frenrita tried to haggle me down, but I stuck firm.

Building the clay workshop wasn’t easy. It needed to be much bigger than a regular hut, and I couldn’t yet modify craftplans too much. For a while I wondered how I’d get around this without having to grind my skill and rank it up.

Eventually, I thought of something that might work.

“Where do you want this?” I said.

“Near lake,” answered Gorgal. “With window that look on lake, please. I like to look on lake when I work.”

“You got it.”

I created two clay huts, placing them exactly side by side. Then, I got Gorgal to use his hammer to smash through one wall. Using wet clay, I joined the huts together at the edges of the missing wall, smoothing clay over to insulate it.

I used a crude chisel to cut out a window for him to look out, and then it was ready.

“What do you think?” I said.

Gorgal fetched Frenrita, who was busy unloading their things from their cart. She took a break and then, joining us in the bare workshop, stood with her hands on her hips and nodded approvingly.

“Good. Is good. Our very own workshop, Gorgal! No more work for boss.”

“I’ll leave you guys to it,” I said.

No sooner had I left the workshop, than I got a notification.

Blade’s Rest is now a Hamlet – Level 2!

- Blade’s Rest fame increased

- 3x hamlet reward boxes gained

- 300 exp received

Blade’s Rest still wasn’t listed on the world map. It was only a hamlet, and there must have been hundreds of them spread throughout BaS. The world map would get cluttered pretty quickly if each one was listed.

On the local map, however, it was represented as a blue house-shaped symbol. Upon leveling up, the symbol pulsed a few times, and faint waves crossed the map. I guessed that meant its map strength was wider now and it might attract more NPCs and players.

The hamlet reward boxes appeared on the ground in front of us. These were long and rectangular like footlockers but made from unvarnished oak. Nametags floated above them, indicating that there was one chest for each of us.

“Guys,” I said.

Linc had been inventorying his herbs in his hut, while Lilly had been using a hand-sized whetstone to sharpen her blade. They came over when they heard me call.

“You guys didn’t get the notification about this?” I asked.

“Oh. Yeah, I always leave mine to build up,” said Hilly. “I like to have lots of ‘em to go through in one sitting. Lemme check.”

“Cool, a reward box,” said Linc.

Linc sprinted to his and threw the lid open. He pulled a pair of foragers gloves, a basic field almanac, and a rolled-up poster with hundreds of plants drawn on it.

He studied it for a minute and then said, “Looks like if I put this poster up in my hut, it’ll slowly level up my foraging. Doesn’t even matter if I’m actually in the hut.”

“Right. Your own hut acts as a sort of base within a base for you. Whenever, you die in-game, you’ll respawn in your hut. It’s linked to your character now.”

Hilly took a different approach to her hamlet reward chest. She kneeled in front of it, delaying the moment of opening it.

“Bloody hell, Hilly, what are ya waiting for?” said Linc.

“Shut it! I didn’t get many presents when I was a kid. Once you open a present, it’s gone, in a way.”

“Well it isn’t gone. Y'know, because you get the present.”

“I know. But the anticipation is always better.”

“Just open the bloody thing!”

Finally she opened it, scoring for herself an instruction manual on basic sword maneuvers, a special sword sheath that always kept a blade sharp, and a leather chest piece that was tougher than her existing one and had the etching of a stallion scored onto the front.

She took off her armor and put the new piece on. “Whaddya know. A perfect fit. Funny how everything in this game always fits, huh? So…who wants my cast-offs?”

For a moment, the player in me eyed the chestpiece greedily. I only had fur chest armor, and this one was much better. But I need to remember what our roles were in Blade’s Rest.

“I reckon I’ll be spending more time in Blade’s Rest than you guys,” I said. “Whereas Linc’s gonna be picking daisies and stuff. He should take it.”

“Ah, I couldn’t do that, Josh. You should have it.”

“Alright then,” I said. “Don’t say I didn’t offer.”

“Uh…”

“What’s up?”

“You’re just gonna take it?” said Linc.

“Sure. You said I should have it.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t mean it. I was doing that thing where…”

I laughed. “You take the armor. I’ll be okay for now.”

“Well?” said Hilly. “Gonna open your chest?”

Seeing the decent loot that Hilly and Linc had gotten from their chests, I was excited to open mine. Rather than delay it and enjoy the anticipation, I threw back the lid and looked inside, only to find a few planks of wood and some screws.

“Huh?”

Hilly laughed. “I think you got short-changed, buddy. Did you piss off the AI?”

“This can’t be right.”

I lifted out the wood and the screws to see a slip of paper resting at the bottom of the chest.

“This is more like it,” I said.

[Small] Crafting Table - Assembly guide

Thank you for purchasing a BaS Corp crafting table! Please read the following instructions to assemble it. Precautions must be taken for safety, and remember - always…

The instructions went on and on, but I’d assembled plenty of flat-pack items. I moved apartments a year ago, and I had decided fresh start, fresh furniture. This involved a trip to a Scandinavian furniture shop, where I bought an apartment's worth of furniture that was overpriced, considering I had to assemble the damned things myself.

But anyway.

“This is a crafting table,” I said. “For crafting stuff that’s small to moderately sized.”

“You can already do that, can’t you?”

“Well, yeah, with improvisation, but a crafting table gives me way more options. And anything I make on the crafting table is automatically ranked average or above, relative to my skill. Also, it reduces crafting speed. I’m gonna put it in my hut.”

I took the crafting table to my hut and placed it by the wall. The place was already looking crowded, and I barely had anything in it.

Later, I planned on building myself a workshop to do all of my work in. Earning five crafting skills to become a builder was going to involve lots of work and lots of tools.

For now, I was concerned that I was just haphazardly placing buildings in the hamlet. I wanted to have more of a plan in place before I slapped another hut down. I didn’t like stuff being unorganized, yet part of me wanted to hurry, hurry, hurry and get this place built already.

But maybe I needed to be patient.

We’d barely even started on Blade’s Rest. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it damn sure wasn’t planned in one either.

Chapter 9

Blade’s Rest

Hamlet: Level 2

Population: 7

We learned a lot about the blacksmith family, and we learned it quickly. We learned that Gorgal liked to get up at least an hour before sunrise and fire up his forge and set out his work for the day. Much of this involved clearing away the mess Frenrita had left the evening before. The husband and wife took their blacksmithing in shifts, and it meant that they only spent an hour or two together each night.

Gorgal liked to eat pickled lake herring while he worked. He bought this from Atticus and Argyle, who, I discovered, had played a trick on me.

Their fishing hut wasn’t just to keep them warm – Atticus’ wife, Crystal, had started a kitchen there, where she prepared and sold their catches. Sometimes she deboned and then cooked them. Whenever Gorgal needed water to put heated metal in to stop it going brittle, he’d wander down to the lake, inevitably stopping by Atticus ‘n’ Argyle’s Fishery on the way home.

I was annoyed, but what was I gonna do? Burn the place down? I didn’t know that it would have changed much if I knew what the hut was really for in any case. Maybe I would have charged them a little extra, but that was it.

Even so, I felt a faint flicker of annoyance when I saw Gorgal heading down there to fill his water buckets, then stopping at Atticus ‘N’ Argyle fishery to buy pickled herring on the way home.

“We gotta dig a well,” I told Hilly one day.

It was just me and her because Linc had been gone for two days, which was halfway through the four-day trip into Crookshack woods that he’d planned. He was there to map out the woods and inventory all the herbs and stuff that grew there. We talked to him on teamchat from time to time, but he hadn’t run into much trouble save for seeing a grizzly in the distance.

Hilly: Go and poke it

Linc: Poke a grizzly bear? Are you crazy?

Hilly: Come oooon. Just do it. It’s only a game. When else will you get the chance to poke a bear on the ass?

Linc: Sure it’s a game, but this thing looks too real for my liking. I ain’t poking it.

I had been on Linc’s side in the exchange – this place felt way too real sometimes, and I wouldn’t like to get close to an apex predator like this. I told them so, and the matter was settled – Linc wasn’t gonna poke the bear.

With Linc away, I only had Hilly to run my ideas by. She considered what I had said about building a well.

“Build a well,” she said. “Maybe. But the lake’s right there, and we don’t need to drink in any case.”

“I was thinking for Gorgal. It’d make it easier for him. Plus, we’re gonna have to attract more businesses if we want this place to grow, and they might need a well.”

“Hmm. Seems to me you could build a dozen wells, and he’d still go to the lake. Never seen a guy eat so much pickled herring.”

His peculiar appetite aside, Gorgal was a dedicated craftsman. He could spend hours in his workshop, heating metal and then clanging away with his hammer. All day long the sounds rang out, with barely any breaks. He specialized in making swords and tools, while Frenrita was adept at making metal armor. Together, they offered a pretty good complement of metal products.

Gorgal worked from morning until evening, at which point Frenrita took over. When it was her turn to work the forge, Franz and Hanz accompanied her and tried to learn. Franz didn’t have much appetite for it, but Hanz always kept a sketchbook with him, and he made diagram after diagram of his mother’s working methods. The two boys were not allowed in the workshop when Gorgal was working, since he couldn’t stand distractions.

“It’s pretty amazing, ain’t it?” Hilly said to me one night, as we watched Frenrita working while Hanz scribbled in his leather bound notepad.

“Amazing?”

“Just how you could watch her work and your brain starts to forget that she isn’t really here.”

I nodded. “Honestly, it seems dangerous to me, this place being so lifelike. Some folks might never want to come out.”

“Tough titties. It boots you out if you stay in too long. They don’t want a lawsuit on their hands.”

Just then, Franz picked up a loose piece of metal the size of a pebble from the floor and threw it at his brother. Hanz punched his arm, and Franz punched him back, and before long the boys were wrestling on the workshop floor.

“Boys! You will get out or I hammer you!” bellowed Frenrita, before focusing back on hammering a sword into shape.

“Safe to say that the AI in Gobbler’s Crook has been bumped up,” I said.

“You reckon?”

“Look at them,” I said. “This isn’t low-level NPC behavior.”

“I don’t know. Might be some kind of pre-programmed routine. You know, the boys getting in trouble, and that kind of thing.”

“Nah. I reckon the devs have sent a big vat of Turing AI our way.”

“Ten silvers says they haven’t.”

“Done.”

Blade and Sheath being such a dynamic game, the arrival of Gorgal and Frenrita had wider effects on Blade’s Rest. It started when Gorgal went to Dustpost and secured a contract for making 100 pickaxes for a mining company who were heading to the Thunderstrike Mountains. Those were the mountains that we could see from Blade’s Rest, which I intended on exploring one day.

Gorgal and Frenrita were working twenty-four hours per day to get the order finished, and they just about managed it when the mining company came to collect. They arrived in a convoy of four wagons – three of them to transport the miners, and one to carry equipment. They were pulled by four mules each. When Polli, Gorgal’s mule, saw the others, she wandered over to say hello.

Hilly, as her usual paranoid self, watched their arrival while holding her sword. I peered out with my hand pressed against my forehead to shield my eyes from the sun.

The head of the mining company – Flintlock & Sons – rode separate to his workers, covering the miles atop a black stallion. Approaching Blade’s Rest, he swung off the horse. He took a cigar from a leather burlap sack that he wore around his shoulder. He clicked his fingers, making a spark light the cigar.

I went out to meet him.

“Name’s Gaben Flintlock,” he said. “Pleased to meet ya.”

“Josh Boothe.”

“Boothe. You got a cousin in the Yarmel Peaks?”

“Yup,” I said. I don’t know why. Maybe I just enjoyed getting into character.

“Ah. I met him not long back. Might be heading that way again, in the future.”

“Tell him I said hello.”

Hilly gave me a sidelong look as if to say what the hell are you talking about? I shrugged.

“I’m here in an official capacity,” said Gaben. “I own Flintlock and Son. There ain’t no son, though. At least not that I know of.”

“Then why do you have it in your company name?”

“Because people trust a family business. Anyways. I’m here to see a fella named Gorgal Muller.”

“He’s in his workshop right over there.”

“Gotcha,” said Gaben. “Say, you don’t mind if my boys visit your tavern, do you?”

“We don’t have a tavern.”

“Ya don’t? Well. Gotta say. On a list of places I’m likely to visit again, somewhere that ain’t got no tavern is at the bottom. You sure you ain’t got one?”

I gestured to the hamlet behind me. “Pretty sure.”

Gaben walked away muttering, leaving me to dwell on what he’d said. One of the requirements of future hamlet and village levels involved attracting folks to Blade’s Rest. Maybe Gaben was right – we needed a tavern. I resolved to start planning one. The materials we’d need, the skills I’d have to learn, and so on.

Linc returned from his trip to Crookshack woods a day early. There was good reason for that – he’d gotten too close to the grizzly that he’d spotted, and it tore him to shreds. He respawned in his hut and then came out of the door, swearing to himself.

That night, the three of us had a meeting in my hut. It wasn’t what you’d call a cozy place, but it was getting there. On one side I had my crafting table, which I pushed up against the wall. Opposite it was my bed.

Using my crafting station, I had crafted a bedframe for each of our huts, and Hilly had gone to a farm a few miles east of Westfell and bought four crates worth of wool. Frenrita had let her borrow their cart for 1 copper, and Patti the mule had gladly undertaken the trip. Using the wool and some quilted heavy cloth that Linc had bought in town, I improvised a mattress for each of us.

As well as the bed, I had crafted a table and three chairs for us to sit at whenever we had a Blade’s Rest meeting. If I described the table and chairs as shoddy, then I was being generous. In fact, by sitting in them, we were playing the odds as to which of us would end up with the chair shattering beneath us and dropping us on our asses. But still, they were better than nothing.

It wasn’t a big hut to begin with and all this stuff – as well as three people – made it feel like a tiny cave. But we made do.

“To get to level three,” I said, “We gotta have ten buildings, and one of them’s gotta be a store of some kind.”

“You can whip those up, can’t you?”

“Yup, but we’d have to convince someone to open a store in one of the huts, too.”

“We have Gorgal and Frenrita,” said Hilly.

“Nope. They make big batches of stuff to order. They don’t sell to the general public. Although, it’s worth bearing in mind that in terms of BaS, a store is just a place that sells things. So anything is okay, as long as people can purchase stuff in there.”

“It can’t be hard to convince someone to set up shop here,” said Linc. “I might even do it myself. I’ve been thinking of learning the potioneer skill anyway.”

“Alright. But there’s another requirement for level 3. We’ve gotta have a passing traffic of at least 50 people. These can be NPCs or players, but they’ve gotta go out of their way to travel to Blade’s Rest and stay within the hamlet boundaries for at least four game hours.”

Hilly jerked her finger at the hut door, which was open and offered a rectangular windowed view of Blade’s Reach and the fields beyond. Just outside the town boundaries were four carts, a bunch of mules, and some fellas sitting around a campfire. “There’s a bunch of miners out there scratching their asses. Get them to spend a little time here.”

I shook my head. “Ever since I told them we don’t have a tavern, they haven’t stepped foot into the hamlet itself. So. I’m thinking that we better build a tavern. It’s the perfect way to draw passing traffic our way. What do you reckon?”

“I’d prefer something a bit quieter,” said Linc. “I enjoy the calm vibe we’ve got going on. Pubs have never been my thing.”

“Then why’d you sign up to be a town builder?” asked Hilly.

“For the cash, of course. But now that I’m here…well. I guess I didn’t realize just how immersive this place would be. It kinda gives me the same feeling I get when I’m out foraging in real life.”

“Are you a complete hermit, Linc? No offense intended.”

He shrugged. “Mostly. It’s the way I like it.”

“Well I’m with you on something, Josh,” said Hilly. “We need something to draw folks to Blade’s Rest. Only, I’m thinking of something with a little more bite. Something like a fighting pit where we capture animals and throw ‘em into the pit to fight it out, and folks can bet on the winner. Hey. Linc could fight a bear!”

“That’s the complete opposite of the vibe we were going for,” said Linc.

I drummed my fingers on my chin. “So you guys have suggested I build nothing, or I build a fighting pit for animals. Think I’m gonna have to overrule you on this one. A tavern it is.”

Building a tavern was way more complicated than I expected, and it involved me taking a trip to Westfell town, which was northwest from Blade’s Rest. I traveled to it using the Travelers’ Road about five minutes’ walk from the hamlet.

Travelers' roads were laid out all over BaS, offering a safe way to get from one part of the world to another. The mobs that spawned randomly across the landscape never attacked folks on the travelers’ roads, and you could often find merchants or transport carriages along its various routes who’ be willing to give you a ride for a copper or two. Sometimes there were even mini-quests offered by NPCs you met on the road. Stuff like defending a carriage from bandits while the merchant fixed his broken axel. That kind of thing.

I didn’t run into anyone on the way to Westfell, except for walking past a group of lumberjacks who were heading to join the rest of their company in the Crookshack woods. Their foreman tipped his fur hat at me. I nodded back, and the group filed past.

After spending a while in a tiny hamlet, it was strange to approach a town like Westfell. This was a dev-generated settlement, which meant that it was part of the furniture, where the game was concerned. It had always been here, and always would be. It wouldn’t stay the same, however.

Like many towns, Westfell was growing dynamically as more and more players bought houses and opened player shops within its walls. Said walls were twenty-foot-high stone monstrosities, upon which perched stone carvings of eagles with giant talons. These were the town mascots, and you could find eagle souvenirs and eagle murals everywhere in Westfell.

My visit was brief, and it took me to the Office of Planning on the fourth floor of the town hall. Despite its official-sounding name, the Office of Planning’s in-game purpose was to be a reference point for crafters and builders.

In the office, a man wearing an impeccably neat suit greeted me. His hair was pulled into a ponytail so tight that I could only imagine how uncomfortable it must feel.

“Can I help you?” he said.

“I’d like to see some plans.”

“Certainly.”

He held out his hand. I put one copper coin on his palm. He snapped his hand shut and nodded at me, then turned about and went back to his desk at the far end of the room.

A menu system appeared.

Please select a craftprint:

- Two-story townhouse

- Standard-sized shop

- Standard Sized shop with cellar

- Tavern

- Church

- Church with spire

There were a dozen more items on the list, but I’d already seen the one that interested me. Whereas in a real-life town planning office you’d be able to access the blueprints of existing structures, it was a little different here. In BaS, the planning office showed you the prints for potential buildings – in other words, it was a guide on how to build them. What materials you need, what skills, everything like that.

Looking over the craftprints, there were two problems that stuck out to me. For one thing, I would need the carpentry skill. There was no way to improvise a tavern, not even if I joined lots of wooden panels together. A tavern was a ‘purposed structure’ within the game, and it had to be made properly or it wouldn’t function as a tavern.

The second problem was the materials that I needed. The crafting system in BaS was, of course, way more stripped down than in real life. Even so, the wooden sticks we’d collected from Crookshack woods wouldn’t cut it. We needed lots and lots of timber.

I had hoped it might be a little easier than this, but that was just my impatient side. The tavern took as long as it took. I needed to relax a little. Get into the flow of hamlet life.

Before leaving Westfell, I stopped by the butcher and the grocer’s shops and bought a bunch of ingredients. This being a growing town, I got ripped off. It didn’t help that my bartering skills were low, either. I made a mental note to hire someone with good bartering or charisma to act as a negotiator for Blade’s Rest. Or maybe, as head of resources, Linc should be leveling his charisma a little more. I’d talk to him about that later.

Outside the town gates, I looked into the distance and could just about make out Blade’s Rest. It seemed a long way away, and I was tempted to pay one of the carriages departing Westfell to give me a ride.

“Safe travels,” called out a voice. I turned around to see one of the steel-clad town guards standing at the gate, waving to me.

“So long,” I told him.

Instead of hiring a carriage, I saved my money and walked back. At least my walking speed was a little bit quicker after putting two points into agility the last time that I leveled up.

In Blade’s Rest, steam rose from the vent that I’d cut into the roof of Frenrita’s workshop and carried in swirly spirals into the starless night sky. From under the workshop door came an orange glow, an inviting one given how cold it was tonight.

I checked Hilly and Linc’s huts, but neither of them were at home. A quick look at my map revealed that Linc was over in the woods. He always tried to get back before it was dark, given that BaS’s hostile critters were way more active when night fell, but he sometimes got so wrapped up in his work that he didn’t always make it in time. His current project was to make a complete field map of the herbs and stuff in Crookshack woods, so that he’d know where to find certain things.

“The beauty of this place,” he said, “Is that stuff always grows back in the same place. You can pick something from the ground, and in a days’ time it’ll have grown back.

Hilly was somewhere way out west. I hadn’t traveled that far yet, so my world map didn’t tell me much about it. She was probably hunting or something, I guessed.

I sent them both a message.

Josh: Need to meet you both in Blade’s Rest in ten game hours.

Hilly: Be right there.

Ten game hours gave them ample time to get back. In the meantime, I headed to the cooking station that we’d set up in the middle of the hamlet, near the fire pit. As well as the clay oven and the cauldron, I crafted a standing table with a thick chopping board on top, as well as drawers on the side to store cooking essentials.

Using the ingredients I’d bought from Westfell, I started cooking. I spread some fat on the pan and got it sizzling, before throwing in diced onions and seasoning them with a little sea salt. When they were golden but not burned, I threw in a handful of chopped mushrooms, waited a few minutes, then added a glug of white wine.

When the wine had mostly evaporated, I poured on some risotto rice and stirred them until they soaked in the oniony, garlicky, tasty-smelling wine flavor. Meanwhile, I had heated some stock in Linc’s cauldron, and I began ladling this into the riot pan and letting it soak up the flavor.

The aroma became so strong that it tempted Frenrita, Hanz, and Franz out of their forge. Gorgal left their domicile hut soon after and stomped toward us.

“What are you make?” he asked me.

“Mushroom risotto.”

“Isotto. Hmm. Did I ever offer sun-dried tomato bread that I make?” he said.

“Nope. Don’t think you ever did.”

“Tomorrow. I make.”

“On the condition that I give you guys some of this, huh?” I said.

“Leave Josh alone, Gorgal. He makes for friends,” called Frenrita.

I held my hand up. “It’s ok. It’s okay. I figured you might want some. What’s the point in calling this place a community if we can’t share a little food?”

By the time the risotto was ready, Linc and Hilly were back. Linc was wearing a thick fur coat that he’d bought in Westfell. It was artificed so that it helped him blend better into his surroundings, which he hoped would spare him from more grizzly bear attacks.

Hilly’s sword-bearing muscles were a little more pronounced today, indicating that she’d leveled up again and put her attributes into strength.

“Where’ve you been?” I asked.

“Killing stuff. What’s cooking? Smells delicious.”

“Grab me some bowls, will ya?”

Gorgal, Frenrita and the boys provided their own bowls, and I dished out enough grub for everybody. The seven residents of Blade’s Rest sat under the night sky, with the firepit spreading warmth on our faces. Gorgal brought out a miniature barrel of ale that he’d brought all the way from his home in East Sydentland. Despite it being the only serving of his favorite beer that he was likely to get for a while, he shared it willingly, and he spent the rest of the night in an uncharacteristic, good cheer. But when Frenrita told him to get his lute and sing a song for us all it seemed that his disposition had been pushed too far, and he returned to his grumbling ways.

When the family retired to their hut, the three of us stayed up. We didn’t need to sleep, obviously. That was one of the perks of full immersion – you got the good things such as nice tasting food, without the trappings of feeling pain or tired. The BaS devs had always been open about their view that people didn’t want to play a game where they got hurt or felt like they needed to sleep. So, any tiredness we felt while playing BaS was our own, real tiredness.

“I went to the planning office to check out what we’d need to build a tavern,” I said. “Turns out it ain’t gonna be easy.”

“What’s the deal?” asked Hilly.

“Short of it is that we need money. First, I need to get instruction in carpentry. I could either go hire a master to train me, which would be quick but crazily expensive. Or I can buy a skilltome and then practice, practice, practice.”

“Can’t you practice without the tome, like you did when you learned improvisation?” asked Linc.

“Nope. Carpentry is a little more advanced than that, so it’s harder to learn.”

“How much is a master?” said Hilly. “Coupla hundred?”

“Five hundred. At least in Westfell. There might be a cheaper one somewhere else.”

Linc made an impressed ‘Woooooooooo’ whistle. “I’m still getting used to how much 1 gold is worth in here compared to real life. Then again, I never spend much in real life, either. Foraging is a nice lifestyle, but it ain’t a lavish one. I’m guessing five hundred gold is a lot here?”

Hilly nodded. “Enough.”

“So what about a spell tome?” asked Linc.

“Skilltome. Maybe thirty bucks. Gold, I mean.”

“So go for that.”

“I guess I will. I just…well. I’m being impatient, is all. I wanted to go to a master and just get the skill and that’d be that.”

“You don’t appreciate nothing you don’t earn,” said Hilly. “My grandpa taught me that. I’ve worked all my life. Even when I was a kid I took whatever Sunday jobs I could. Nothing feels better than working.”

“Working isn’t everything,” said Linc.

“I didn’t mean it to cause offense.”

“I know. Just what I'm saying is, folks can get by without taking a check and living by the rules. There are all kinds of different ways of living, and that’s what makes life so special.”

“I’ll go to Westfell and hunt down a skilltome,” I said. “But there’s another problem, and this is one we gotta solve. To build a tavern, we’re gonna need lots of lumber.”

“So don’t build a tavern. Build something else,” said Linc.

“Any purposed structure that we wanna build are gonna need more materials than we can gather ourselves. It’s just the way it is.”

“So we need to start making some cash,” said Hilly. “By the way, are there any seconds of the risotto?”

“Nah. There would have been, but I couldn’t say no to Gorgal and the clan.”

“Damn it. That blacksmithing SOB better make me some of that tomato bread he’s always bragging about.”

“Okay, so cash. Blade’s Rest needs a GDP,” I said.

“GDP?” said Linc.

“Gross domestic product. Didn’t you pay attention in business class?”

“I never did business class. I never went to college. Dropped out of school when I was sixteen.”

Hilly said, “Well it means a measurement of the value of the goods made in a certain place. I don’t think Josh here is applying it properly, to be honest with ya, but I get the sentiment. Blade’s Rest needs to produce things that people want.”

I nodded. “We’re already getting rental income from Gorgal and Frenrita, as well as 10% of their profits. That’s already buffering the treasury a little, but it ain’t enough.”

“Go kick those damned fishmongers outta the hut you made for ‘em. They seem to be doing okay. I’ve never seen so many people by the lake.”

“Can’t. I sold it to ‘em.”

“Okay. So maybe we could set Linc up as a potioneer. He’s already got the foraging skill. He can gather whatever he needs. Now he’s just gotta learn how to blend stuff together.”

“I’m finding myself agreeing with Miss Hilly-Rose here,” said Linc. “But I looked into it. Same problem as Josh – it costs a ton to get someone to train me. I didn’t know about spelltomes, though. Skilltomes, I mean So I’ll look into that.”

“I had another idea,” I said.

“The way you just said that all mysteriously, then stopped talking, makes me think it’s something we won’t like,” said Linc.

When Linc was right, he was right. I didn’t think they were going to react well to my plan.

Hilly, who loved bad ideas because they were often dangerous, leaned forward. “Go on then. Spit it out.”

“So this might sound crazy…”

Chapter 10

The next two real-life days were a weekend. There used to be a time when I’d look forward to a weekend of gaming on BaS, but it was different when playing the game was my job. Don’t get me wrong, building Blade’s Rest had totally opened up a new window of enjoyment for me. I was loving BaS again. All the same, I needed downtime.

On Saturday I took Baxter to the veterinary office for a check-up.

“I’m seeing a little more muscle growth in Bax’s thigh, Mr. Boothe, but he still has a long way to go.”

“Is there anything I can do to speed it up?”

She handed me a leaflet. “Hydrotherapy and laser therapy have been shown to help build muscle.”

“On top of his physio?”

“You did ask, Mr. Boothe.”

“I know. Thanks.”

I rang my pet insurance company to ask about them covering Bax’s hydrotherapy. Despite paying the bastards forty dollars per month, they basically laughed me off the phone.

That, coupled with Baxter’s moping face, made me feel lousy. So, I did what always cheered me up. That Saturday afternoon I went to see my mom, and I ate a pot pie dinner with her and listened while she told me exactly why she didn’t trust the Jennings family, who’d moved in a few doors down.

I was back at home by eight in the evening, and I punched straight back onto the clock and logged into BaS.

Hilly was out of town that weekend visiting her sister, who she’d been estranged from for maybe five years. It was an icy relationship and she’d been looking forward to it and dreading it in equal amounts.

Linc, meanwhile, had a few buddies coming over to play D&D. Despite never having played BaS until recently, he was into dungeons and dragons and he and his party had an unbroken four-year session streak. Their current campaign was called the Curse of Mount Bastion, and Linc reckoned they were going to beat it that weekend.

This meant that I was alone when I respawned in Blade’s Rest. It was night-time in Gobbler’s Crook, and a meteor shower was spitting orange streaks across the sky. From the forge came the familiar sound of a hammer pounding on metal. I’d heard it so often that I reckoned even if I didn’t know whether it was night or day, I’d still have been able to tell whose turn it was to work the forge just by listening to the rhymic thuds and tinks. Frenrita’s strikes were more rhymic and precise, while Gorgal hammered metal like he wanted it to die.

Maybe it was good that I was alone. Without Hilly or Linc, I mean. I had a lot to do if we were going to make some gold. But part of me wondered if it was a crazy plan.

The day before, Hilly and Linc had listened to my scheme, laughed at me, and then sat for a moment in silence when they realized that I was serious.

“It’ll work,” I said. “If it doesn’t, what’s the worst that happens? We die and get some debuffs.”

“You say that like it’s nothing,” said Linc. “I know we can’t feel pain or get hurt in here. But our brains don’t know that. I’m tellin’ ya. There was a moment when that grizzly was running at me that I thought ‘this is too real. Get me outta here!’”

“Play on low immersion or on a cheap VR set, if that’s a problem,” said Hilly. “I’m sure the company would send you something less techy.”

“And give up how real this place is?”

“But you just said…”

“It scares me, and yet I love it. I ain’t giving it up at all.”

Eventually they agreed to my plan, and we said that we’d get started on Monday morning when we logged in. Without really discussing it or agreeing on it, we’d come to the understanding that three of us would pretty much always be playing together, when we did play. This wasn’t something required by the devs – Sas had already told us that she didn’t care what hours we worked.

Today, though, I was feeling bad about Bax and needed to log a few more hours at twenty dollars a spin. What’s more, I had some prep to do for tomorrow.

So, I got to work.

First, I spent a few hours creating a bunch of [average] daggers, hammers, and tools such as shovels and rakes. Using my crafting table to do this made the process much quicker. No sooner did I lay some ingredients on it and select something to craft, than the timer appeared and then completed a whole rotation. It took seconds, at the most, to make something.

By the end of the two hours, my inventory was bulging with the most average tools you could ask for, made by the most average craftsman in Gobbler’s Creek.

Next, I stole across the grassy fields and to the travelers’ road, taking care to avoid any of the nocturnal critters that were lurking in the prairie of scutch grass. The night-time beasties were a little tougher than the daytime ones. Instead of wolves there were corrupted wolves, which were basically an undead version. Swooping overhead were big birds with talons that looked like they could steal a chihuahua and get away with it.

I made it to the travelers’ road without getting spotted, and then headed to Westfell. There, I found that the town gates were closed.

I approached the two orcs who were guarding it. Orcs were often chosen for night-time guarding duties on account of their better eyesight and their increased concentration. They wore leather shoulder pads and gauntlets, along with steel chestpiece. Each was holding a spear.

They crossed their spears together at my approach.

“A bit dramatic, don’t you think?” I said.

“Out of hours. Town’s closed.”

“Can’t I just-”

“Our of hours. Town’s closed.”

“Wait a second. Are you trying to tell me that the town’s closed?”

“Push off until mornin’.”

I knew that I was dealing with two NPCs at the very bottom of the AI ladder. Town guards usually were, except when you committed a crime in town boundaries and they suddenly became strategic masterminds. No amount of persuasion would get me past these guys. Or at least, no amount of persuasion with my current charisma level.

Luckily, time moves a helluva lot quicker in BaS and I knew it would be morning soon enough. So, I sat on the ground five feet away from the guards and I stared at them for the full eight game hours it took for the morning sun to rise. I knew it was a ridiculous thing to do, given their low AI, but I got a stupid pleasure from it. I’m just that kind of guy sometimes.

At nine in the morning a town bell rang, and Westfell burst to life. First came a great rumbling sound as levers were turned and the town’s great gates rumbled open. Next, a fleet of carriages exited the town, driven by merchants who had places to be. Their horses' hooves kicked up dust as they clomped past me and onto the travelers’ road. A few players were skulking around the gates and waiting for them to open, and they quickly slipped inside and disappeared into the streets, blending into the early-morning thoroughfare.

Two of the players near me were a level 13 druid and a level 10 monk, and they were heavily into the roleplay element of BaS, traveling the world spreading the word of their separate religions yet doing it together like some kind of buddy cop movie.

I chatted with them for a while, hearing from them what I knew already – Gobbler’s Creek was pretty dead players-wise, because there wasn’t much to do around here. Great place to build a hamlet then, eh? I thought.

To do my part for the marketing of our hamlet, I told them about Blade’s Rest and encouraged them to spread word to any noobs they met.

“What’s there to do in Blade’s Rest?” asked the druid.

“Uh. Well. We got a blacksmith. And a firepit. Gorgal sometimes sings when he’s drunk, but only when he’s really, really drunk, not just regular drunk. Let’s see. What else is there…”

Too late. Conn Molloy the druid and Brother Brigitte were gone, leaving me alone at the gates.

Heading through the gates, I wandered into a town full of life, with hundreds of NPCs preparing for another fake day in a fake world. Though, the scripted NPC pathways were so sophisticated, and the sounds and smells of the town so real, you wouldn’t have known it was just code. If someone kidnapped you, knocked you out, and then put a full immersion kit on you and logged you into BaS, you’d swear that you really had been isolated in a medieval fantasy world.

All around me the citizens of Westfell went about their day. Shopkeepers opened their doors, brushed their stoops, arranged their window displays. An old armorer with a crooked back was doing his best to drag a dummy wearing a full coat of arms out into the street. I gave him a hand, and he thanked me and offered me a coffee.

“Thanks,” I told him, “but I have places to be.”

“Right y’ar. May the eagles bless ya.”

Milkmen rode on bicycles and left bottles in doorways. Young lads ran around the streets selling copies of the Westfell Courier. I didn’t buy one, because I knew that BaS’s detail wouldn’t extend that far. No way was it so sophisticated that an actual newspaper would be generated each day, for a specific town in the middle of nowhere.

Thinking about this piqued my curiosity after all, and I paid a copper for a newspaper. Many of the inner pages were completely blank, existing only to make it appear real. On the front page were articles describing changes happening to BaS as a whole, no doubt put there by the devs to drum up interest for upcoming expansion packs. On the back was a directory of merchants in the area. This was useful, so I folded up the newspaper and put it in my inventory.

My wandering took me to a place called Scribbler’s Row, where all the town’s booksellers had set up shop. There were merchants who sold skilltomes, spelltomes, potion reference books. Even special non-fiction and fiction books that the devs had written to deepen the game’s lore. There was a time in my life when I would have read them all if I was in a dungeon or something and came across them. When it came to games, I used to be an obsessive completionist. It was only lately that I was really trying to mellow out.

The shop that I needed was at the end of the street. It was the smallest shop of the lot, and it had a swinging sign that read ‘Forked Tongue Books.’

Instead of a shop bell giving a gentle triiiiing sound when I entered, I was greeted by the demonic-sounding screech of a hideous bird creature that was perched on the counter. The thing looked like a parrot that had been sent to hell for a decade and then retrieved after being tossed into every ugly pit in the underworld during its stay.

Glaring at me, it screeched again.

“You want a cracker?” I said. “Sorry. I don’t have any.”

The animal glared at me like it would gladly tear the flesh from my bones. It was, however, chained to the counter by a metal ring fastened around its left talon.

Heading to the counter, I gave the animal a wide berth. Nobody came to serve me. I pressed a bell, only to find that it was broken and the mechanism removed.

“Hello?”

Soon, a satyr shuffled into the shopfront. He was a small man who walked on goat legs. He had a pointy beard that was immaculately groomed, and even pointier horns that sprouted from his forehead. The skin around his horns was scabby. I wonder if it was painful when young satyrs’ horns first grew out. Or maybe they were born with the horns already there.

Or maybe the damned things don’t exist, I reminded myself. Man, I could get carried away in this place sometimes.

“Yesssssss?” said the Satyr, his forked tongue hissing over the ‘s’.

“I’m looking for a book that teaches you how to speak grunder.”

The satyr suddenly sprang atop the counter and did a little jig with his goat legs.

“Looking for a book on grunders is he, and for this he comes just to me!”

I burst out laughing at the sight of this goat man prancing around on his counter. This seemed to perturb him because he frowned and then hopped back down behind his counter.

“I may have the volume you require,” he said, in a business-like tone. He left me alone while he went into the back room of the shop. When he returned, he slid a black book with a red trim toward me.

“Five goldsssss.”

That was a hefty price. No doubt because I had pissed him off.

“I wasn’t laughing at ya dancing,” I said. “It just took me by surprise, is all. I came in here for a book. I wasn’t expecting such a display of…uh…satyr culture.”

“Nobody expects a display of satyr culture. Do you know why, you shabbily dressed lout? It is because our culture, for centuries, has been diluted until people see us as no more than prancing riddle makers.”

“I didn’t come here looking for a riddle. Doesn’t that count in my favor?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

The satyr put his head in his hands, and his horns shook as he gently sobbed into his hairy palms.

I reached over and patted his back. Man was it bony!

“There there. It ain’t that bad. Tell ya what. While I’m here, gimme a book on satyr culture. The best you got.”

He lifted his head. “Really?”

“Sure.”

He sniffed. “The only one I have is this.”

Quickly – way too quickly – he reached under the counter and pulled out a giant book. I’m talking the biggest book I had ever seen. I could have used the thing to knock out an elephant if I was that way inclined and I had an elephant that needed knocking out. He let it drop on the counter with a thump that woke up his weird demon bird in the corner, which promptly started squawking again.

“Hush, Percival. Can’t you see we have a customer?”

I sighed. “How much for the book?”

“A mere ten silvers.”

Cursing the absolute shoddy state of my conscience that made me feel compelled to console a fake-ass satyr in a video game, I placed one gold coin and ten silvers on the counter.

I picked up the satyr tome. The thing was so heavy I felt like it was going to make me topple over. Luckily, things didn’t weigh anything when they were in my inventory. The game was merciful on that score.

As I left, the satyr said in sing-song voice, “Grateful for your business I am, learn knowledge of satyrs now you can!”

I put my arm in the air and gave a wave without turning around. “Yeah, yeah.”

When I got outside the shop, I glanced through the window, where I saw the satyr holding the coins aloft and dancing a jig again, while smiling wider than a clown. It was then that I knew the weird guy had played me like a cheap fiddle. The crying had been an act to guilt me into buying something else, damn it. The satyr must have one hell of a charisma stat.

Opening my inventory, I took out the satyr culture book and flicked the pages. They were blank. I mean, of course they were. The devs were hardly going to write a 2000-page book on the history of satyrs, just to stock in some pokey little shop in Westfell.

Damn it, damn it, damn it. I would have said that satyr could go to hell – but he’d probably enjoy it.

Back in Blade’s Rest, I studied the book on grunder language. It was titled ‘Peglar Ok Na Makua.’ But that was just one side of the book – turning it over, there was a different cover, and the title read ‘Learning to Speak Grunder.’

As I held it, a notification tag appeared directly above the book.

Language tome: Grunder

Difficulty: Low

Requirements:

Intelligence minimum: 3

I satisfied the intelligence requirements at least, even though I had just had my trousers (metaphorically) pulled down by a conniving satyr and didn’t feel particularly clever.

The book was two hundred and sixty-three pages long, however the devs had only filled in one page. This was a list of basic grunder-to-English greetings. The existence of content in the rest of the book was implied.

Grunder language, it turned out, was based around many words with one syllable each. As such, it took them many words to say a normal sentence, which was probably why they sounded so high-pitched when they spoke to each other – they were just speaking very quickly.

For a strange half an hour I practiced saying the words out loud. Anyone passing by the hamlet would have found it very, very strange, so maybe it was a blessing that nobody ever visited Blade’s Rest.

After reading all of the phrases and speaking them out loud, a skill notification appeared.

Do you wish to learn the skill: languages?

I’d already decided I was gonna be careful with my skills. So, before allocating one of my two available skill slots to this one, I checked it on Sheesh.

Languages

A skill dependent upon intelligence and boosted by charisma (See: Charisma article). Skill in languages opens dialogues with some of BaS’s stranger inhabitants, and can lead to questlines otherwise unavailable.

There are 102 languages to collect in BaS. Learning and using them counts toward skill rank and overall exp. Those heavily skilled in languages are more likely to gain charisma increases when allocating attribute points to intelligence.

Damn it. I needed to be able to speak grunder, but I couldn’t do that without the language skill. According to the wiki on the Sheesh website, this skill didn’t compliment a crafting build at all. This made me reluctant to take it.

A big weight suddenly settled on my shoulder.

I jumped, only to realize that it was Gorgal. He must have just finished his shift in the forge because he smelled like fire and his skin glistened with sweat. Even his beard was flatted against his face by the outpouring of perspiration.

“Oh, hey, Gorgal.”

He settled down in front of the firepit. You’d have thought that he’d had enough of fire for the day, but evidently not.

“Problem, little man?” he said.

The use of little man would ordinarily have been an insult, but I had come to learn that Gorgal didn’t mean it so. In fact, standing at seven feet tall and being much bulkier than the average guy, he was envious of people like Linc, Hilly, and me who didn’t have to have our clothes custom-made if we were far from home. That was why three full crates of the family’s possessions had been dedicated to clothes. Before leaving their homeland, they bought as many shirts and trousers and stuff as they could because it’d be difficult and expensive to get proper garments here in the west.

“Problem?” he repeated.

“Eh, not so much. More like a decision, which I suppose is the same thing sometimes. It comes down to this, Gorgal. I need someone who can speak grunder.”

Gorgal scratched his beard.

“Ech im ma ka Rae og na fa ket,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Means ‘Why you need grunder speak, in grunder language.”

I stared at the giant blacksmith, amazed.

“Gorgal, my friend. We need to talk.”

Chapter 11

One real-life day later, four of us left Blade’s Rest and traveled south, heading past Black Salt lake. It was raining today, and not many people were fishing, Hilly explained.

“Does the rain scare the fish?” I asked. “Make them think it’s birds or something?”

“It’s more that it makes it harder for the fish to see bait, and it can muddy up the water. Best time to fish is after it’s been raining. More flies on the surface then.”

I noticed with annoyance that despite the early hour, a large queue had already formed outside Argyle ‘n’ Atticus Fisheries. As we went past it, Gorgal looked longingly at the home of his beloved pickled herring, and even took a step toward it.

I grabbed his sleeve. “Remember our deal,” I said. “Do this for us and I’ll buy you a weeks’ supply of herring.”

“Pickled herring.”

“Yes, pickled herring.”

“Herring with no pickle is not good.”

“Right.”

Hilly leaned toward me and whispered. “I can’t believe you got him to agree to do this just for some herring.”

“Agree? I didn’t need to. I offered to take 1% off our cut in the forge if he helped, but he said no. The guy is obsessed with pickled herring.”

Soon, we neared a familiar-looking outpost situated in the middle of a field of brittle, yellow grass. In front of us was the grunder village. It had changed since the last time we had been here. They had added three feet of height to their wooden fence, and they had tightly thatched the individual posts together to make them more compact and defensible. As well as that, they had installed a new gate made from rusted iron. I doubted the grunders had mastered metalwork, so they must have bought it from someone.

This was good. Their willingness, or even desperation, to deal with outsiders meant that my plan might work.

“Any prizes for guessing that is because of us?” said Linc. “I keep reading how dynamic this game is. We killed a bunch of their people, so it stands to reason they might get defensive.”

I scratched my chin. “Maybe. Although that’s a possibility, we’re overthinking it. Grunders attack folks all the time. Fighting is part of their nature. Besides, they won’t know we’re the ones who attacked their scouts.”

“Fighting is in their nature, huh. Is it really. How interesting that we’re walking straight toward their village, then. Remember me why we’re here again?”

“Remind me,” said Gorgal. “Not remember me. Is bad grammar.”

“I take your point,” Linc, I said. “But this isn’t gonna end in a fight. Gorgal?”

The giant nodded. Normally, Gorgal wore one of a number of plain shirts that he sweated into while he worked all day, then washed in the lake once per week, along with the rest of his family’s clothes. Today, however, he was wearing what appeared to be his smartest shirt. It was navy blue, and it had no sweat patches, no stains, and no tears. It made me think that maybe I ought to have made more of an effort.

“Stay here, you,” said Gorgal. He took his blacksmith’s apron from his inventory and put it on over his shirt, making me feel a little bit better about how I was dressed.

He strode across the field, a giant of a man clad in a blacksmith’s apron made to resist the fires of hell, and wearing gauntlets on his hands and forearms that were tough enough to sustain an errant hammer blow, if Gorgal were ever so careless as to let that happen.

A noise rose from the grunder camp. A sort of excited chittering that grew as Gorgal got nearer and reached an absolute zenith when he stood in front of their gates.

Seeing him standing in front of their village gates put their fortress into perspective. It was laughable, really. He could have yanked their new gate off its hinges using his bare hands and then snapped it over his knee.

Instead of doing that, however, he stuck to the plan we had discussed.

He said something in grunder.

There was silence. Not just the normal kind, but a sudden sort of silence that means something.

Gorgal repeated himself.

A head appeared from the top of the gate. The grunders must have some kind of support beam on the other side, I supposed. This grunder looked older than the rest, with a hunched figure and old, wizened eyes. Or as wizened as a gunner’s eyes could be.

Maybe he was their leader. Or at least their spokesman. That was the guy I’d have to target.

The grunder said something. Gorgal took a while to process this. He wasn’t completely fluent, he had told me, but had picked up conversation grunder in his travels as a lad.

When Gorgal replied, the grunder disappeared from view. From behind the gate came a rapid-fire exchange of their high pitched language, which was so nonsensical as to be gibberish from where we were standing.

“This ain’t gonna work,” said Hilly. “I’m telling ya.”

“Have a little faith,” said Linc.

The grunder appeared again. From his tone, it seemed like he asked Gorgal a question.

Gorgal pointed at the three of us, where we were standing clear of the grunders’ bows’ shooting distance. Four more grunder heads popped up on their side of the gate, and they stared at us.

I waved to them.

“How’s it going?” I said. “Nice day for it.”

There was a moment where neither man nor grunder spoke and the air was tense, and it was also brittle like a rice cake ready to snap in half.

The great gates of that great civilization rumbled open. It was a momentous moment. Not to Hilly, who was looking at her fingernails. But even so.

Gorgal crossed the distance back to us in twelve long strides.

“They will with you, the meet.”

“Good. Thanks Gorgal.”

“You will give me coppers for herring. Two weeks of the pickle and the herring.”

“Not until this is done. We still need you.”

“Ag. Damn this. Come on.”

Gorgal led us across the field and into the grunder camp. Dozens of the hairless, rat-like creatures stared at us as we crossed the threshold of their fortress. The camp was structured so that there was a giant fire in the center, and their homes were built in a circle around it. Not unlike Blade’s Rest, actually. Instead of huts, though, the grunders had four feet tall mounds of hardened mud that they’d burrowed holes into. Glancing into one of their mud mounds, I saw it filled with straw bedding.

For every four or five mounds there was one clay hut. Glancing in as we passed, it seemed that the huts were used for storage and for utilities such as cooking, whereas the grunders felt more comfortable sleeping in their mounds.

Suddenly, the oldest grunder darted into our path and threw a thick, red liquid on us. It splashed my face, Linc’s trousers, and Hilly’s waist.

“What the hell?” said Linc.

Hilly reached for her sword, but Gorgal stopped her.

I had to stop myself from grabbing the little shit and throttling him. It was hard. Something about having liquid thrown on me made me see red.

Breathe, I told myself.

If we started a fight right now, we’d die. There were too many of them. Maybe if Gorgal helped us we’d have a chance, but even so, whether we died or we killed them all, it was failure either way.

Gorgal explained to us, “Is just custom. Stain will clear by itself in time. While stain is on clothes, grunder guarantee no harm.”

I looked down at my shirt, besmirched by whatever the hell the liquid was. Blood, maybe? I didn’t know of any kind of blood that just cleaned itself, but who knew. I wasn’t about to get Gorgal to ask.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said. “Thank them for their hospitality please, Gorgal. You know. We’re honored to be here. That sorta thing.”

“Thank them? Honored?” said Hilly.

“It’s called diplomacy.”

“It’s called chickenshit.”

“We’re in their home, Hilly. They could kill us in a second if they wanted to.”

“I could take a few of ‘em out with me. You’re supposed to fight mobs in BaS. Not make deals with them.”

Maybe Hilly had a point. I’d never heard of someone negotiating with low level mobs. Then again, it was well known that BaS rewarded experimentation. The devs had some kind of system where, when a player did something unusual, they could allow the game to allocate more AI power to that part of the game map. I was sure there was a better, more technical way to describe it, but I wasn’t a techie kind of person. We had already experienced this digital phenomenon with Atticus and Argyle, as well as the appearance of Gorgal in our lives.

“I will make greeting,” said Gorgal.

The grunder chief was called Wizened of the Oak, but would accept Oak as a form of address. His clanmates called him master, but this wasn’t a title required by strangers. Oak led us across their village and to the biggest mud mound, which was guarded by six grunders.

Oak scampered into his mound and gestured for us to join him. A problem there – even though it was the biggest mound in the village, it was still tiny.

“He requests that one will join him,” said Gorgal.

Linc and Hilly both looked at me. “Your idea, after all,” said Hilly.

“I will not fit,” said Gorgal.

I shrugged. “A bit of mud doesn’t bother me.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Linc.

I kneeled down and crawled into Oak’s home. The floor was made surprisingly soft by piles of compacted hay, but there was little else in there to make it homely. Once I was inside the burrow it was a little taller, and I could stand up as long as I adopted a hunched posture.

Oak clapped his claws and sent one of his guards scurrying away, and then he said something to me. I didn’t catch any words, but then, I hadn’t accepted the language skill.

I turned toward the burrow entryway. “Did you happen to catch that, Gorgal?”

“He asks what you can trade,” said Gorgal.

“Tools. You know. Shovels, hammers, that kind of thing. They’re crude quality, but they’re cheap and I can make lots of them.”

Gorgal repeated this to Oak.

“He says that he wants weapons.”

I pictured dozens of grunders advancing on Blade’s Rest, armed with axes and knives that I made for them myself.

“We aren’t arming the grunders,” I said.

Oak and Gorgal spoke for a long time, their voices carrying in and out of the burrow. The blacksmith sighed at places and said a word, which I assumed was a request for Oak to repeat himself. Finally, Gorgal said, “He says this is peaceful settlement. You attack scouts, they do not attack you. He will overlook this for good of clan but you must sell what he needs.”

I tried to remember if the grunders had shown us any hostility before now. They hadn’t when we attacked them to get a hut craftplan, sure. But that wasn’t the only time we’d faced them.

“Tell him that grunders attacked our village.”

Gorgal repeated this.

“He asks what name of village is?”

“Blade’s Rest.”

“He says stupid name.”

I laughed. “Thanks.”

Oak spoke at Gorgal for a while. His expression was a mix of anger and fear, his old, rat-like face pained with whatever he was saying.

“He says that the grunders who attacked you are Redfang’s clan. Not Oak’s. Oak and clan are peaceful, and need more weapons for defense against Redfang.”

Interesting. So there were more factions within grunder society, and some were both better armed and more hostile than others. Though, I supposed that being better armed and more hostile went hand in hand. Maybe I had misjudged Oak after all.

“Right. Gimme a second.”

Using my browser, I checked Sheesh to see if there was any mention of separate grunder clans and a rift between them, as well as differing levels of hostility. There wasn’t.

I dipped my head out of the mound and told Hilly and Linc what we’d talked about so far.

Linc had the interested look of a guy who’d been exploring the Congo and found a new species of ape. “Fascinating,” he said. “I could actually be sick with how excited I am with all this. Cooperate with them.”

“Hilly?”

“I think there are better ways to make some gold. We could go do some quests. Or just farm mobs until we get enough loot to sell.”

“This is all about playing BaS differently,” I said. “We’re supposed to build a town, remember? That means doing town stuff. Think back to when the grunders attacked us. They looked different, didn’t they? Or is my memory playing tricks?”

“They were a little bigger, had bigger muscles, and they had red markings behind their right ears,” said Hilly.

“Then Oak’s telling the truth about part of it, at least.”

I turned back to Gorgal.

“Tell him we’ll sell tools for 10 coppers per item. Orders of 100 or more get a 10% discount. We won’t sell them weapons, and that’s the end of it. Finally, we will take 10 grunder children hostage and raise them as thralls, as insurance for his continued peace.”

“Hostage? Grunder children?” said Gorgal.

“I’m joking about that part. But please repeat the rest.”

While Gorgal spoke with Oak, the three of us waited. I half-crawled out of the burrow just so I could get some air.

“Man, it’s stuffy in there. Don’t know how they stand it.”

“Can the grunders even pay us?” said Hilly.

“That’s what we’ll find out. But they aren’t getting any tools unless they pay upfront in any case.”

Gorgal finished conferring with Oak. “He will agree to price. And can pay. There is merchant south of here who will trade with grunder, so grunder have coin.”

“Oak, my friend,” I said, “You got yourself a deal. Put her there.”

I stretched out my hand, and Oak grabbed it with a decrepit paw and we shook on the first human-grunder settlement trade treaty to ever be formed in BaS.

Chapter 12

Back at Blade’s Rest, I set about crafting Oak’s first order of tools. He and his grunders needed 200 crude shovels so they could dig a new burrow level below their existing one. Their village as we had seen it was just the tip of the iceberg apparently – underneath it were levels upon levels of tunnels and burrows.

“Tell me something,” Linc asked Gorgal. “Why don’t they use their claws?”

“You trying to talk us out of our first order?” said Hilly.

“I’m just interested.”

Gorgal thought about it before answering. “Is debase in grunder culture. Claws not for digging.”

Since I had a lot of shovels to make to order, I paid Gorgal coppers to buy himself pickled herrings and told him that I had to go.

“Tell me something…” said Linc.

“Sorry, forager man. I buy herring. Pickled.”

“You’re walking to the lake? That’s okay. I’ll come with you.”

“No. I uh go to different pickled herring shop.”

Laughing, I left them to it and crossed Blade’s Rest, coming to my hut. I had a lot to do, and I wanted to finish it as quickly as possible so I could get on with building our hamlet.

“Alright then,” I said. “Two hundred shovels. Should be easy.”

Crafting en masse really was pretty simple in BaS. As long as I had enough materials in my inventory, I could select ‘crude shovel’ from my improvisation menu and then choose how many to craft. My skill would then work in the background, with the timer flashing by on the right-hand side of my display. It meant that I couldn’t use other skills at the same time, but that didn’t matter much for now.

I set the crafting in motion and then thought about what to do next. There was a helluva lot of stuff in play.

First, this new deal meant that Blade’s Rest was pulling in income from Gorgal and Frenrita’s rent and their forge proceeds, our trades with the grunders, and any pelts or loot that Hilly earned when she was out hunting. Our treasury was steadily growing. Unfortunately, so was the number of materials we needed to grow Blade’s Rest.

“Did you see the new menu screen?” said Hilly, approaching me from her hut.

As joint owners of Blade’s Rest, the three of us had access to its stats and its limited menu options. After leaving Oak’s camp, a new one had appeared. This one was titled ‘Factions’.

Factions

Grunder camp [Chief: Oak]

Relationship: Cordial

- Send gift

- Request aid

- Send threat

“Press send threat,” said Hilly. “See what happens.”

“What happens is we’ll start a war.”

“It’s a game! So what if we have a war with a bunch of rats.”

“This isn’t some kind of fort,” I said. “It’s Blade’s Rest. A nice hamlet. We don’t go threatening war on our neighbors. Life’s stressful enough without that shit.”

“Bah. I knew I should have been playing Age of Honor instead.”

After the first order of shovels was shipped to the grunders and we received our payment in return, I finally had enough gold to buy a skilltome and the materials that we needed for a tavern.

I would have expected that crafting so many things using my improvisation skill would give me a decent push toward earning the next rank. Looking at my stats, it didn’t seem to be the case.

Why was that, I wondered? After quickly looking it up online, I learned that a novice improviser wouldn’t level up by creating [crude] items. I was now capable of making [improved] items after all.

It was kinda like long-distance running. At first, running five kilometers at a consistent speed would be tough. Then, my body would adapt to it. Soon, I’d be conditioned so that five kilometers wasn’t much of a problem for me anymore. At that point, continuing to run the same distance again and again would lead to stagnation. I’d have to increase either my speed or my distance.

Applied to skill use in BaS, it meant that supplying the grunders with crude items wouldn’t rank me up. I had to adjust my craft quality and produce improved items to progress.

After the grunders paid us for the shovels, we had a hamlet meeting in Linc’s hut. He had boiled mint leaves in the outdoor cauldron and made a fresh-tasting tea for us, which we drank out of clay cups that I had crafted using my crafting table.

Hilly drank hers quickly. “Very refreshing. Don’t suppose there’s more?”

“It’s in the cauldron. Help yourself.”

She was gone for a moment, then returned back to Link’s hut with a full mug.

Linc’s hut was a similar size and shape to mine, and he had the same kind of bed. Only, he had placed his bed in the center of the room. Right above it, he’d cut away part of the roof so that he could see the stars.

On his wall was the poster he’d gotten from his hamlet chest, with hundreds of different plants and flowers on it. Just having it there passively leveled up his foraging. I’d looked up online to see if there was something similar for crafting. There was, but such passive levelers were only available as randomized loot drops. You couldn’t buy them.

“Alright then,” I said. “We have the grunders’ payment to divide between us. Obviously, it should go three ways. But I had an idea. What if we divide it four ways, but leave a quarter of it to one side? Think of it as town funds.”

“Seems reasonable,” said Linc.

Hill shrugged. “I guess we gotta invest in Blade’s Rest if we want to grow it. To be honest, I can’t believe they actually had the coins to pay us. They weren’t lying.”

“They paid us in coppers,” I said. “The full amount, but all in coppers. Anyway, I’m gonna head to Westfell when it’s light. You guys coming?”

Both of them agreed, and as soon as the BaS sun rose in the sky we set off. Hilly was all for paying for a ride on a carriage since we were flush with gold. Or at least flusher than we had been.

Linc was having none of that. He loved walking through BaS, though his pace was constantly slowed by him kneeling down every few minutes to inspect a leaf, or diverting in an arc around us to go forage something he’d seen in the distance. Sometimes, even I found his pace a little infuriating.

Ever impatient, Hilly walked with us for a few minutes before jumping on a passing merchant carriage and flipping a copper to the driver. He was transporting candle wax from Port Down to Westfell, and he had a little space amongst his crates on the back.

“Sorry, lads,” she told us. “I just don’t have the patience for walking. Enjoy it, though. Linc, make sure to point out to Josh every flower that you see.”

“Don’t listen to her,” I said. “The foraging stuff is interesting.”

Linc shrugged. “It ain't a hobby for everyone, that’s for sure. But thanks for saying it. But anyway, we’ll talk about something else. Like…hey! Is that a…”

Before I could say a word Linc was off, leaving the travelers’ road and tramping onto the nearby field, where he stared at something buried within the green stalks.

With Hilly riding away and Linc leaving my side often to check on plants, I walked much of the way alone. It was okay though. BaS was pretty damned beautiful in the red glow of its rising sun, and there was something that never got old about the lack of cars beeping their way through their morning commutes, and there being no buses coughing out smoke from their exhausts while on the sidewalk folks hurried both past and into each other as they navigated busy city streets.

In some ways, I reckoned BaS was the kind of world we could have built for ourselves if we were different. Or maybe I was being naïve. Yeah, I definitely was.

Still. I liked it. It wasn’t hard to see why folks paid a subscription to BaS, bought full immersion gear, and then stayed away from dungeons, questing, and fighting. There was so much more to the game than that.

By the time we neared Westfell gates, Linc was deep into a show-and-tell of the various herbs and leaves he’d picked on the way here.

“And this one’s called Red Cluster. Depending on what you brew it with and how you brew it, you can either temporarily increase someone’s total mana, or you can decrease it. There are lots of ingredients that go one way or the other. You gotta be careful when you see something that looks edible, both here and in real life.”

Hilly was already at Westfell gates, helping the merchant unload his boxes of candle wax. I was surprised at her show of helpfulness and was about to say something when the merchant hobbled around his carriage and I saw that he had one arm and one leg. His right leg was missing at the knee, and he had a wooden stump fixed to it, with his trouser legs folded up. His right arm was just as stump, nothing more.

He took a coin purse. “Here you go, lass,” he said, offering her a gold coin.

“I couldn’t possibly…”

“I insist.”

“Ah, well, what are you gonna do if a guy insists?” She took the coin, and then she saw us. She smiled and waved. “Hey, guys! Let’s get some breakfast, on me.”

It was still early morning, and the two orc guards were standing to attention outside the gates. When we got near to them, they crossed their spears together just as they had last time.

“We gotta wait until at least 9:00,” I said, “Or they won’t-”

Hill stepped forward. “Hey, fellas! How’s the day treating ya?”

To my amazement, the guards uncrossed their spears. One of them said to someone unseen. “Open ‘er up.”

The gate clanked opened, and the three of us entered Westfell a good two hours before visitors were allowed to.

“What was that?” I said.

“When I hit level three, I chose a perk that gives me rapport with any soldiers, guards, or mercenaries. Now. What do you guys want for breakfast?”

She took us to a tavern called the Guilty Goose, which had a sign that depicted a giant, white goose with a somewhat guilty look on its face. I hadn’t thought it was possible for a goose to look guilty, but I was proven wrong.

“I wonder if I can buy a print of that,” I said. “Put it up on my hut wall.”

Hilly glared. “I hate geese. Stupid feathery serpents.”

The Guilty Goose was unlike the other taverns in Westfell, in that its main customer base were the night watchmen who patrolled Westfell’s streets and walls after dark. As such, they often were relieved from their shifts in the early morning, before anything was open.

The tavern landlord was a dwarf named Felix Grubhyde, and he had a good business mind. He pounced on this gap in the market by applying for a special opening license, then making sure his doors were unlocked in time for the watchmen to finish their shifts. The Goose, as people knew it, became a regular haunt of the night watchmen. The watchmen, in turn, recommended the place to their day colleagues, and thus Felix had a steady stream of regular customers.

I made a note of this. When we opened a tavern in Blade’s Rest, it would be wise to have a USP. To cater to a certain type of folks. I needed to think about it. Who would come to a place like Blade’s Rest? Travelers, maybe? The Travelers’ roads were close by. Merchants too, I guessed.

Anyway. That was a thought for a later day.

“Ah, good mornin’,” said Felix Grubhyde, from behind the bar. “What can I get for yer?”

With the gold coin that she’d earned from unloading the wax candles, Hilly bought us breakfast. For herself she ordered what Felix called the ‘Leviathan’, which was a cooked English breakfast with six sausages, eight rashers of bacon, four slices of toast, as well as the staples of grilled tomatoes, baked beans, mushrooms, and some hash browns. Never one to be outeaten, I ordered the same. Linc went small and ordered poached egg on toast. And a pot of coffee.

It was a struggle to eat the Leviathan, but I matched Hilly sausage for sausage, bacon for bacon. I didn’t know if this was a competition in her mind – we hadn’t said it out loud. For me, though, it was very much an Olympic gold medal event.

“What’s so good about foraging for stuff anyhow?” Hilly asked, chewing half a sausage.

Linc had already eaten his poached egg on toast and he’d placed his knife and fork neatly on the plate. He sipped coffee from a cup.

“Well for one, it’s proven that being outdoors is good for our brains and our moods. Second, it’s meditative. I can just wander around, search for interesting stuff. Not think about anything.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “Can’t let my mind settle. Even when I walk Baxter, I listen to an audio book.”

“It’s a skill like anything else. Thirdly, foraging is useful. You can find stuff to eat, herbs to add flavor to a dish. You can find dyes, things for maladies. You should try it.”

“Maybe I will,” said Hilly.

Hilly finished her breakfast way before me. When my plate was empty, I took a slice of toast from a side plate and slabbered it with butter. Then I swept it across my plate, using it to mop up the delicious bean juice and egg yolk. Hilly shook her head at me. “So uncultured,” she said.

With our bellies satisfied – hunger cravings in BaS were very tame but it still felt food to satisfy them – Hilly paid Felix and tipped him a copper.

“Thanks for the grub,” she said.

“Much obliged. You come back soon, and make sure you bring those appetites with you again.”

We headed out of the Guilty Goose and onto Bagsall Road, which was an especially quiet part of Westfell even with the presence of a tavern. This was due to a ‘rough element’ that had taken residence in an abandoned church hall at the end of the road. The NPCs wouldn’t have guessed, but I reckoned it was probably a thieves’ guild. Near us, a couple of newspaper boys were playing a game that involved tossing pebbles near to each other’s feet.

“I’m gonna check out the town armorers,” said Hilly. “See if I can upgrade some of my gear.”

Linc turned in a circle. “Where would I find potioneers?”

I pointed to a street named Chapel Row. “I saw them the last time I was here. Follow that street, then turn left. By the time you’re near, your mini map should update with any shops in the area.”

“Or you could just speak to a guard and ask for a map upload,” said Hilly. “But if you want to take the hard route, that’s okay.”

“Ah. Yeah. Or you could do that,” I said.

We each went our separate ways, and I followed my own thread of destiny into the inner town, which was gradually getting busier and busier. There was something different about Westfell today, though. Streetlamps that burned multi-colored oil dotted every road, and their glows were bright even in daylight.

Every third streetlamp had people standing on ladders and tying banners so that they stretched across the road. The banner nearest me had writing on the other side, so I hurried down the street and went past it, then turned so I could read it.

The banner read, ‘Happy Oracle Day.’

“Oracle day?” I said.

One of the men who had fixed the banner to the streetlamps climbed down from his ladder. He took a pipe out of his pocket, poked tobacco into it, and then lit it. He was a rotund man who wore a flat cap that almost covered his eyes. He stood in front of me with his hands on his hips and regarded me like I was a stranger trespassing on his land.

“Aye. It’s oracle day. Hope you brought your coppers,” he said.

“What’s oracle day?”

“Just what it says. Fortune tellers come from all over to read our futures. They mostly set up shop in Merchant’s Plaza. Here’s a tip for you, lad. Don’t bother paying for two oracles and asking the same question. Because when you get two different answers, you’ll be none the wiser.”

The man who tied the banner across the street joined us. He was skinny and he was wearing dungarees with one strap broken, and the front was smeared by oil. “Or don’t pay ‘em at all. A man shouldn’t know his future.”

“I agree,” I said. “I guess I won’t be paying them anything.”

My route to the street with all the bookshops took me through Merchant’s Plaza. This was a rectangular area with cobbled paving and a statue of a man holding a sword aloft in the middle. A giant eagle rested on his right shoulder.

On the outskirts were dozens of stalls where various fortune tellers and psychics had set up. Nearby, the more enterprising merchants in Westfell had set up their own stalls to sell refreshments to tourists. One guy was selling champagne and whiskey. Above the champagne was a sign that read ‘good news’ and next to the whiskey a sign read ‘bad news.’

I wasn’t going to pay for a reading, of course. Maybe in real life I’d have done it for a laugh, even if I didn’t believe in it. If I was at a carnival or something. But game psychics were even more removed from possibility than ones in the real world.

As I hurried through the place, I got too close to a psychic’s stall, and she snatched my wrist. She was an old woman with a frail frame, but her grip was strong.

I shrugged my arm away from her.

“Just because you’re old, doesn’t mean I won’t-”

“You mustn’t go there,” she said, her voice seeming to rattle like bones in a coffin. “You mustn’t go! It won’t end well for you!”

“Good morning to you too. What do you mean, I mustn’t go? Go where?”

A guard standing nearby laughed. “She’s said that to everyone who walked past. Don’t worry yourself, lad.”

“Thanks,” I said, walking on.

When I reached Scribbler’s Row, I checked every bookshop for what I needed. I headed into True Tomes, Riverhide Books, Jonesy James’ Second-hand books, and another three shops. None of them had what I needed.

In the second to last shop, Hugill’s First Editions, I said to the owner, “If I went to the carpenters’ guild, would they sell me a skilltome?”

Hugill was a tall man with sleepy eyes, and he said very, very slowly.

“They…would…not. They make…gold…taking on apprentices. It would…be…bad for business…to sell…skilltomes.”

“Damn. Okay, well thanks anyway.”

“Safe…travels…”

That left only one shop to try.

“Damn it,” I said to myself.

Reluctantly, I headed to Forked Tongue goods. Upon opening the door, the horrible demonic bird gave a croak, and soon enough, the satyr came skipping down the hall and into the shop front.

Today, he was wearing a smart waistcoat and cravat. Around his neck was a piece of twine with bells on it, and he had bells threaded into the strands of his goatee beard.

In one nimble leap he mounted the counter and gave a jig on his hoofed legs.

“Into my shop you have come, books you will buy and-”

Seeing that it was me, he stopped singing and hopped down.

“Oh. It’s you.”

“It’s me,” I said.

“I didn’t expect you to return, so I did not.”

“Neither did I, but here I am. I’m not too happy about being conned,” I said.

“Conned?”

“The satyr book.”

“A price I offered, and accept you did,” he said in a singsong voice.

One thing I was learning about the satyr was that he only used this way of talking when he was trying to deceive, trick, or lie. I wondered if it was some kind of satyr ability. I wondered if plugging my ears when he sang might help. Or maybe I should just come back with a great big axe and deal with it that way.

Nah, I wasn’t playing BaS that way anymore, I told myself. Besides, most NPCs couldn’t be killed. I was going to have to try a different tack. One which didn’t sit well with me – having a nice, reasonable conversation.

And if I had to lie to make it more reasonable, then so be it.

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I spoke to the town guards, and I told them about your tricks. Turns out I ain’t the first person you’ve done it to. They’ve had lots and lots of reports about your tricks, and they’re getting sick of it. They said if they get one more report about dishonesty from you, they’re shutting you down.”

“Dishonest I was not, for-”

“C’mon. Enough of that. Do you have a carpentry skilltome?”

The satyr sighed. When he spoke next, his voice was much deeper and disgruntled. “Stay there a second. Let me check.”

He was gone for three minutes, during which his demon bird stared at me nonstop.

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” I said.

In response, it gave me a look that seemed to promise that it would one day see me burning in the digital fires of a digital hell.

When the satyr returned, he was carrying two things – a book and a bottle of red wine. Beneath the counter, he grabbed a glass from a shelf I couldn’t see and he poured himself a glass.

“Sorry, how rude of me,” he said, and produced another glass.

I shrugged. What the hell? If you can’t enjoy a glass of red wine with a satyr in a game, when can you?

As we sipped our wine, I said, “This is a lovely bouquet.”

“You don’t know the first thing about wine, do you?”

“Nope.”

He laughed. “I’m Bryp,” he said. “Some of the idiots in this town pronounce it as Burp. That is wrong. Do that, and I will put a curse on your descendants. Not personally, but my cousin Ulgham knows the fair folk. He has connections.”

“So how should I say it?”

“I suppose in your rough tongue it would sound like ‘Brip’. Drip, but with a B.”

“Okay then, Bryp. I’m Josh. Say it however the hell you like. I ain’t sensitive.

Bryp tapped the carpentry skill tome “Go ahead, human. Look at it.”

“I think I will.”

“Don’t trust me?”

“Nope.”

Bryp laughed. “Very wise.”

On the cover of the book was a wood planer and a chisel. Opening the book, it did indeed seem to be a skilltome. As the satyr was letting me read it, I wondered if I could just read the book quickly in front of him and whether that would earn me the skill.

Bryp snatched the book away from me. “Don’t you think I see what you’re trying to do? You aren’t half as sneaky as you think.”

“I could say the same for you. Can’t blame a guy for trying. There’s a sucker born every minute, after all.”

“A sucker?” said Bryp. “I don’t know what those are, and I don’t know how the frequency of their reproductive cycles is relevant. Humans are strange, so they are.”

I explained to Bryp what a sucker was, and what it meant for one to be born every minute. When I finished, he clapped his hands together and smiled.

“A splendid saying! I will use it all the time from now on. You know, it isn’t often a human has much to teach me. As thanks, you can have a 10% discount on any purchases.”

“Thanks very much. Let’s start with the book, then.”

Game time being what it was, it was already mid-afternoon by the time I left Bryp’s shop and headed through a now-heaving merchant’s plaza. The merchant with the champagne and whiskey stall was making a fortune – pun intended – as there was a line of folks queuing up to buy his expensive ‘good news’ champagne. When I saw one of the fortune-tellers sneak behind his stall and whisper something into his ear, I reckoned I knew what scheme he was pulling.

I met up with Hilly and Linc by the town gates. Linc was the proud owner of two skill tomes – one for potioneering and the other for alchemy. Hilly had treated herself to a new sword.

“It’s just an upgraded version of my iron sword,” she said. “I couldn’t afford much else. But it does more damage.”

Our business concluded, we walked back to Blade’s Rest as the sun began to set on the world of Blade and Sheath.

Chapter 13

Learning the carpentry skill using a skill tome wasn’t as quick as it would have been if I simply hired a master to teach me, or even another player. That was the best way to acquire skills if you had the coin, since you just paid the gold and you had the skill instantly. Using a skilltome was, however, cheap. I liked cheap things.

To learn the skill, I had to read the book – which only had 2 pages of real content despite its thickness – and then craft something from a range of options in the book using a planing tool, chisel, and hand saw that I bought in Westfell. I also needed to use a hammer, but I was able to make my own using my crafting station.

There were seven beginner carpentry products that I could make to learn the skill, these being a chopping board, crate table, shelf, dog bed, bird nest, a small set of step ladders, or a bedside table.

Checking the carpentry guide on Blade and Sheesh, I learned that the projects you chose decided how quickly you learned the skill:

Starter projects are as broad as they are long. Choosing the ‘shelf’ project means you will create the shelf quickly. However, you will likely need to create a dozen before you earn the carpentry skill. Whereas it will take longer to make a set of step ladders, but you will only need to make two or three sets.

I saw more utility in creating bedside tables, since they could be used for inventory storage, and I could give one to Linc and Hilly. Using oak from my inventory, the hand saw, and my crafting table, I made the appropriate cuts until a ‘bedside table’ crafting item appeared. I selected this, and then waited out the subsequent timer.

The first table was knee height, with one drawer, an open alcove for storage, and a smooth surface for resting a cup of coffee, oil lantern, or a book on top. The edges were rounded and smooth, but it was unvarnished and unpainted. It was good to say that I’d never made a table before, but I would be happier when my skill was better.

I got back to it, making table after table. Every time I did this a progress in the upper-right of my display filled up. It took me making four tables until I got a notification.

You have learned a skill – Carpentry.

Rank: Apprentice

The activity of creating or repairing things using wood.

Do you wish to accept [Apprentice] carpentry?

Of course I accepted, and one of my skill slots was taken up by carpentry. This added a new option on my skill list, and when I selected ‘Carpentry’, I was taken to another menu.

Carpentry:

Create

Repair

Improve

When I selected ‘create’ I was shown a sub-menu with many options. The things that I could create using carpentry were grouped together according to type. There were the initial seven ‘starter’ projects, which I could now create without being near a crafting table, as long as I had my carpentry tools.

Additionally, there were thirteen more projects that I could make, such as a table and chair set of [average] quality, which would presumably be much better finished and aesthetically pleasant than the shoddy table and chairs set I had already made. And they came with the added bonus of a ‘you will not fall straight through the chair and onto your ass’ lifetime guarantee. Or at least I hoped they did.

There was also the option of making bookcases, doors, lockboxes. Even outdoors stuff like a timber bench, vegetable planters, and tool sheds.

I selected ‘structures’, and scanned the list to find what I needed.

Tavern

An inn or a pub that supplies food and drink to guests, and often has rooms for rent. Large taverns may have a dedicated restaurant and stables.

According to my skill level, as a rank ‘apprentice’ I could only build a small, one-room tavern with an open-plan adjoining kitchen. I couldn’t even construct a cellar to store barrels in – the beer barrels would have to be kept in another hut that I would make separately.

Even so, you have to start somewhere. A tavern is a tavern. I had the skill, now we just needed the materials.

When I went to meet with our head of resources, I found him on all fours in the scutch grass pastures, sniffing the ground like a dog.

“Linc?”

He straightened up, stretching his arms above his head until his back cracked.

“Hey, Josh.”

“Busy?”

“I was just looking for truffles. You can sell ‘em for a decent whack in Westfell. I figured we might get lucky.”

“Don’t you find truffles in the woods?”

“Yeah, mainly in moist soil and near beech, oak, and fir trees. But this isn’t real life. It’s supposed to be a little easier to find them here.”

“Any luck?”

“Nope. Anyway, what’dya need?”

I told Linc about the tavern and my carpentry skill, and I handed him, a written list of the materials we needed. His eyes flitted side to side as he scanned the list. He folded it up and put it in his pocket.

“Alright then. There’s a bunch of loggers in Crookshack woods who have surplus to sell, and I’ve been getting pally with them. Took them a few flasks of my blueberry and nettle tea, and they went mad for it. I reckon I can do a deal. They process the logs into timber at a small plant north of Crookshack. Leave it with me.”

“Thanks, Linc. You got any of that tea going spare?”

He laughed. “Check my hut. I’ll give you access.”

Linc was gone for quite a while. He sent a message on teamchat saying that he’d bought the timber, more than enough for the tavern and a few more buildings besides. He said that he was on his way back, but it was a full real-time hour before he returned.

“Did, you get lost?”

“Lost?” Linc scoffed. “I know that place like the back of my ass. My foraging skill is good enough now that it tells me when something interesting is nearby. I see it as a sort of golden glow. So I went looking, and one glow led to another, and I lost track of time. Got some good ingredients, though. Lemme get your timber.”

He piled the timber on the ground beside his hut.

“That’s definitely more than we need. Should keep us going for a while,” I said.

“I figured that. No point making the same journey twice. They gouged me for price, though. One of us needs to increase our charisma, or we’re gonna keep getting ripped off for stuff.”

“Wouldn’t that be you, as head of resources?”

“I won’t always be the one doing the buying, Josh.”

He had a point. I was so set on a crafter build, that I was actually focusing too narrowly. Charisma was an under the hood stat of intelligence, and my intelligence was pretty decent.

Taking what Linc said into account, I decided that maybe it would be a good idea for me to boost my charisma after all. As a frugal guy, one thing that annoyed me most was getting ripped off. Besides, haggling for materials was going to be just as much a part of crafting as actually making stuff, so maybe a charisma-based skill wasn’t such a waste of a skill slot.

I went into my hut and sat at the table in the center. This was a new and improved table that I made using my new carpentry skill, and it was a nice feeling to rest my arms on it and not feel like it was going to split into two pieces.

“Alright then. Time to boost my charisma.”

I took my grunder language tome from my inventory and repeated the grunder phrases, just as I had before.

Soon, a prompt appeared.

You have learned a skill – languages.

Rank: Apprentice

Do you wish to accept [Apprentice] languages?

This time, I accepted the skill and filled my last available skill slot. At least until I leveled up again. The skill was added to my character sheet.

I didn’t feel much different, at first. But when I glanced at the grunder phrasebook, I instinctively understood the grunder words and read them as though they were in English. Then, I realized that they actually were in English.

Ah, so that was how the language skill worked. When Linc looked at the grunder words, he’d see incomprehensible arrangements of letters. Whereas I had an apprentice rank in languages, so I could read the basic phrases like they were written in English. In other words, the game automatically converted them for me. I guessed it would work the same with speech, too.

Learning this didn’t have an outright effect on my charisma, but if I earned EXP by using my language skill, then the next time I increased intelligence it should improve my charisma under-the-hood stats some.

It was night-time in BaS by now. Outside, the air was crisp and it brought with it a faint smell of cooked fish that made my stomach rumble. South of us by Black Salt lake there was a fire. It was coming from Atticus ‘N’ Argyle fishery, but there was nothing wrong. It looked like they were having a cookout on a makeshift firepit.

Just then, Gorgal left his forge. He was covered with sweat. He started to head toward his home, but then caught the scent of fish in the air. He tilted his head upwards, sniffing like a dog scenting sausages. Almost as if he was transfixed, he started walking toward the lake.

Frenrita left her hut to start her shift in the forge, followed by Hanz and Franz. She saw Gorgal heading toward the fishery, and grumbled and shook her head.

Soon, a young boy ran from the cookout by the lake and toward Blade’s Rest. It was little Billy, and he had a beeswax parcel in his hand. Inside was smoked trout cooked in parsley and lemon.

“This is from uncle Argyle!” he said.

“Tell him thanks,” I replied.

I knocked on Linc’s hut and offered him the salmon, but he was hunched over a worktable that I’d crafted for him. He had a book open on one side and a bunch of plants and stuff on the other. He said he wasn’t hungry without even turning around.

There was no answer from Hilly’s hut, though I could see that she was online. Opening my local map, I saw a blue dot maybe ten kilometers away, at the outer edges of the scotch grass fields. I guessed she was hunting. Different beasts roamed the fields and pastures depending on the time of day, which meant she was out at odd hours.

I ate half of the salmon and then wrapped the parcel back up and left it beside the door of Hilly’s hut. Then, it was time to make a tavern.

Opening my carpentry menu and selecting ‘tavern’, a screen appeared with a greyed-out outline of a simple tavern. This one was a single floor, though I could have added more floors if my skill was good enough.

In terms of customization, I was able to drag the door and reposition it wherever I wanted on the diagram. Similarly, I could add or move wooden window frames.

For a roof, my options were limited to thatched and slate. I chose thatched, since this was a simple tavern of simple construction, and I didn’t want to risk the roof being way heavier than the actual building.

My final customization was with the tavern sign. I chose a shield shape, and on the sign, I wrote the words ‘The Blade and Grunder’.

My thinking was that tavern names were always two apparently opposite words, such as the Axe and Chicken, or the Cowardly Lion. Blade and Grunder seemed to fit that.

All that remained was to actually make the thing.

As with crafting, all I had to do was defrag timber from my inventory. Once I had placed enough of it, I finalized the carpentry, and a timer appeared.

This one was going to take a while.

Chapter 14

I accomplished a lot in the next few real-time days’ worth of playing. First, the Blade and Grunder tavern was finally ready, and its appearance caused a stir among the inhabitants of Blade’s Rest. Which, in reality, was just me, Hilly, Linc, and the blacksmith family.

I positioned it away from the central grouping of huts, thinking that this could be the residential area of the hamlet, and that the tavern should be a little apart from it. Residents might not like the noise that came from a tavern at night.

It began as an empty shell of a building with just a sign outside and a wide-open space within. I spent some time crafting tables, chairs, a long bar with shelves behind it, and a hearth.

When I invited Hilly and Linc to tour it with me, they walked around the room for a minute or two, before sitting down at a booth by the hearth. This booth was in the corner and had a wooden barrier around it, closing it in and making it cozy. This type of tavern seating was called a snug, and I was glad that they had sat there, since I’d intended it to be our regular spot.

“This looks great,” said Hilly. “Just one problem – there ain’t no beer.”

I nodded. “We need to recruit someone to run the tavern. I looked into it. We can either hire an NPC and pay them wages and keep all the tavern proceeds for ourselves, or we can recruit a live-in manager. We’d have to build them a hut, and they would take care of the tavern and run everything for us. If we do that, we only keep 50% of the profits, since they’re doing most of the work.”

“I don’t like the idea of giving up profits,” said Hilly.

“It might be the best thing to do,” I said. “Otherwise we’d have to order beer ourselves, maintain stock levels, that kind of thing.”

Linc’s eyes bulged. “The game really goes into that kinda detail?”

“Sure does.”

“Let’s vote on it,” said Hilly. “I get the deciding vote if it’s a tie.”

Linc and I didn’t necessarily agree with that but it didn’t matter – we voted to hire a live-in tavern manager.

Later that day I traveled to Westfell, where I paid ten coppers to a recruitment center. They had an office above a poky little haberdashery shop, and I met with a woman named Fiona Smalls, who promised me ‘small fees for big satisfaction.’

“So,” she said. “You need someone to run your tavern.”

I nodded.

“Great. We have lots of people with tavern experience. What kind of place is it?”

“Uh, just a tavern. It sells beer. Maybe pies too.”

She gave the politest smile she could whilst somehow still letting me know that I had given a stupid answer.

“Is it a lively tavern? Will there be music? Games? Is it the kind of tavern where the manager might be expected to break up a fight? Will there be gambling, perhaps? Will you require the service of…ahem…ladies and gentlemen of the night to offer an extra menu to your customers? Will there be a dining restaurant?”

“Alright, I get what you’re saying. I’m picturing a place where folks can get a bit of respite. You know. I want the Blade and Grunder to be like an English pub hidden in the countryside. The kind of place where you’ve been traveling for hours and you see the sign swinging in the breeze, and you suddenly get the urge to sit next to a log fire and order a steak and ale pie and a pint of beer.”

She scribbled something on a notepad. “Okay then. A quiet yet relaxing place. Leave it with me, Mr. Boothe, and we will filter our candidates and supply you with any who are suitable. The fee for a successful candidate placement is fifteen gold, subject to them successfully completing a three-month probationary period.”

“Thanks. I’ll look forward to it.”

After stopping at a carpentry supply store to buy better tools and some wood glue, I headed back out through the gates. I was within sight of Blade’s Rest when I got a notification. It had only taken four game hours.

Three candidates have been found for your vacancy:

Blake ‘Cutter’ Fowl

Sergeant Fowl served with the Empire’s Midnight Regiment for fifteen years, before receiving a medical discharge. Seeking a change of lifestyle, Blake has decided to try managing a tavern. He has carried his militaristic sense of order and organization into his new occupation…as well as rough handling of unruly drunks.

Penny Poppenthwart

An ex-stage singer whose vocal cords are too damaged to sustain her trademark voice, Ms. Poppenthwart seeks employment in a lively environment. With her running your tavern, expect rowdy nights and many sing-songs.

Hercule Mattenblack

Little is known about Hercule Mattenblack.

Hilly, Linc, and I met in the now fully furnished Blade and Grunder to discuss who we’d hire. It was a battle getting Linc to join us, he was so wrapped up in combing the lands around Blade’s Rest to add to his ever-increasing potioneering supplies.

“I don’t know about you guys,” said Hilly, “But I really like the sound of Hercule Mattenblack.”

“The sound of him? It tells us nothing.”

“I know. But here’s what I’m thinking. Hercule is gonna be a tavern owner like you see in lots of fantasy books, right? A mysterious guy with a mysterious past. He probably doesn’t speak much, and he doesn’t do nothin’ except serve beer. Yet at the same time, you get this sense that there’s more to him, and that he’s handy in a fight. There’s a thick air of intrigue around him.”

“Whereas we know for sure that Blake Fowl is tough, because it says so,” I said.

“His name appeals to me, I ain’t gonna lie,” said Hilly. “I wish I had a nickname like Cutter.”

“Linc?”

Linc chewed his bottom lip. He glanced at the empty bar across the room, as if picturing someone standing there serving drinks.

“To me, a tavern is a place you go for a quiet drink, right? You sit in the snug, maybe have a hot meal, and you talk to your friends or whoever you’re there with. Penny Poppenthwart sounds too rowdy for me. Especially for a hamlet like ours. And I reckon that this ‘Cutter’ fella might bring trouble, too.”

“So you’re for Hercule Mattenblack? Even though it doesn’t say anything about him?”

“This is a game, Josh. We aren’t running a real tavern with our own money on the line. Sure, in real life I wouldn’t hire a guy whose CV said that nothing was known about him. But here, it might be fun.”

“Sure. Maybe you’re right. I guess I get sucked into this a little too much at times. Alright. Hercule Mattenblack it is.”

I used my menu system to offer Hercule the job, and I received a notification saying that Hercule would arrive in five days, as he had to make his ‘preparations’ or whatever the hell that meant.

In the meantime, we were busy. We paced out new boundaries for our hamlet, allowing plenty of room for it to grow. We already knew that Sas had selected this part of the game map for us to build on, but it seemed that we had some leeway into how far we could spread.

We had to be careful, though. According to the town planning strategy guide on Sheesh, if you spread your land boundaries too wide at the beginning, then your hamlet would lose a sense of identity and community, and it would be harder to attract new residents and visitors. So, we increased our boundaries a little, while being conservative about it.

After that, I made and sold a bunch of crude spears to the grunders, and Linc used the gold to buy more timber. We built up a hefty surplus, and we stored it in a new clay hut that I made just for keeping materials. Only Linc, Hilly, and I had access to it.

One afternoon, Hilly came to see me. She was heading out to go hunting, and she was wearing dark brown combat leathers and held a well-made bow in her right hand.

She leaned on my doorstep. “I was thinking. Now that we marked out boundaries a little better and you improved your crafting skills, we could use a perimeter wall.”

It was unlikely that grunders would attack again. We had a cordial relationship with the nearest settlement, and Hilly made regular patrols around Blade’s Rest to keep it safe. Moreover, it was unlikely that any mob critters would randomly attack a populated place. Even so, it couldn’t hurt to bolster our defense. Part of growing a town, I read, was making sure residents felt secure.

“Good thinking. I’ll get on it.”

It took me three whole game days to craft a defensive fence around our hamlet. It was ten feet tall and it matched the grunder camp fence in sophistication, which was to say that it wouldn’t repel an army. Still, it gave us some security from the more hostile creatures that prowled Gobbler’s Creek at night, and it satisfied a future level-up requirement. It also made the whole place seem more real, if that was the right way to describe it. Like it was an actual settlement.

In the central residential area of Blade’s Rest I built six more huts. I provided the basic furnishings of a bed and table and chairs in each of them, and then I waited for settlers to arrive in the same way Gorgal and Frenrita had.

Over by Black Salt Lake, Atticus and Argyle’s business was doing so well that he asked me to build a second, larger hut for them. Still stinging from how they’d deceived me about their hut’s purpose the last time, I made sure to charge them proper craftsman rates.

I told them how much I wanted. Atticus shook his head.

“For a simple hut? That’s obscene.”

“Sound like you really need it. If you know any other builders, feel free to ask them,” I said.

He and Argyle conferred for a moment, before Atticus stomped away. Argyle offered me his hand to shake. “Deal.”

For half a day’s work in constructing their hut, I earned 300 gold. Not bad going for something that took me 1 button click, two game hours, and some scrap timber materials.

Hercule Mattenblack was supposed to arrive any time now. Before he did, I wanted to get something done.

“We need a sign,” I told Hilly and Linc.

“For what?”

“The hamlet. You know. Welcome to Blade’s Rest. The kinda sign you see when you go somewhere.”

“Okay. So make one.”

“I just wanted to see what you guys thought we should put on it.”

Linc scratched his chin. “We could have a motto. You know. Like, in Hampton, Virginia. Their motto is ‘First to the sea, first to the stars’ on account of them being the first English speaking settlement in America, and NASA putting their first training ground there.”

“Maybe ours could be ‘First lunatics to open a trade treaty with grunders’,” said Hilly. “But I got a suggestion of my own.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Picture this,” she said, mimicking the sign in front of her with her hands. “Death to all ye who enter here.”

“Right. That’s a nice, friendly welcome sign right there.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have a motto,” I said. “The sign should just say Blade’s Rest.”

“Real imaginative, Josh.”

“What, can I say? I’m a practical guy at heart.”

That afternoon I planted a sign outside the hamlet that said ‘Blade’s Rest.’ Looking at it, I got to thinking that maybe it was time that we built a road that led from the hamlet, and joined it up with the travelers’ roads that led to Westfell and other places. It would make it easier to attract passing traffic.

As I stared at the distance to see how long the road would have to be, I saw a man riding on horseback. He wore a fur coat with a collar that covered his stubbled face. Strapped around his horse was a leather sheath, inside which was a broadsword.

Suddenly, four wolves emerged from the undergrowth and attacked the horse, two on each side.

The man swung off his horse and landed on the ground, and in one fluid motion, he drew his sword.

The wolves surrounded him, heads hunched low, tails ramrod straight.

He made a beckoning motion to them and then leaped.

What followed was a fury of fur and steel, with the man pirouetting this way and that, accompanying every turn with a swing of his sword.

It was just a minute before the beasts lay dead around him. Without missing a second, he sheathed his sword and then produced a dagger from his belt, and he cut the wolves' pelts away and stuffed them into a burlap sack tied to his horse.

He climbed back on the horse and headed toward Blade’s Rest.

“Fuck, he’s cool,” said Hilly.

When Hercule Mattenblack reached the hamlet, he tugged his horse’s reins. He looked around, chewing on a grass stalk.

“This Blade’s Rest?” he said, in a gravelly voice.

“Sure is, stranger,” I said, making my own voice low and gravelly.

He climbed down from his horse and shook my hand. “Name’s Hercule.” Then he patted his horse. “This is Yuri.”

“Names Josh,” I intoned. I patted Hilly on the head. “This here’s Hilly.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” said Hilly, half-smiling.

Polli, the mule belonging to Gorgal and Frenrita, came trotting across the field, where she stood a respectful distance from Yuri and sniffed the air. Yuri sniffed in return, and both horse and mule took a step closer until their snouts touched.

Hanz and Franz came scampering by. “We will look after your horse, mister,” said Hanz. The boys’ English was much better than their mother and father’s. I guessed it was easier to learn a new language when you were younger.

Hercule flipped them a copper coin. It spun twenty times in the air, before he caught it perfectly on the front of his right boot. With one smooth kick he flicked it to the boys.

“Treat Yuri nice,” he said, “If ya don’t, he’s likely to kick ya into the sun. Now. As good as it is to meet you folks, where’s the tavern you need me to run for ya?”

Hilly whispered to me, “One copper to share between them? Cheap bastard.”

It turned out that not much was known about Hercule Mattenblack not because he was mysterious, but because after initially signing up at the recruitment center and telling them he wanted to get a job in a tavern, he neglected to show up for the second interview where they’d learn more about him.

He wasn’t being coy with his biographical information, though. In my hut over an herbal tea, he was happy to tell the three of us a little more of his past.

“So. What do you wanna know?” he asked, reclining back in his chair.

“Just tell us about yourself. What you’ve been up to before now.”

“Alright. Settle on your saddles and listen, because I got a tale for ya.”

Hercule, incredibly, was a bounty hunter who made most of his money rounding up soldiers who deserted from the army. The empire in BaS paid him handsomely for each deserter he captured, and he was damn good at this job.

That was until he was sent to track down a kid named Jucksy Manta, who’d fled from the empire’s Third Eagle regiment, who were beating back a rebel uprising in Kostanowiz, which was in the far south.

Hercule rode for five days and nights, finally finding Jucksy hiding under the lip of a limestone cliff. When he caught him, he couldn’t believe how young he was. The kid was fourteen years old, and he’d somehow tricked recruiters into letting him join up. Now that he was in the army and realized what kind of a life it was, he wanted to leave, but they wouldn’t let him. Not even when he told them his real age.

His sergeant had told Jucksy, “No matter how old you were when you joined, you’re sixteen now, lad. Says so on your forms.”

Hercule decided he wasn’t going to take a kid like Jucksy back to the regiment just to be hanged. So he helped him escape to Blaitwist, where his pa and brothers were going to meet him and smuggle him away.

Only, the fates were conspiring against Hercule and his newfound conscience.

“Jucksy was a plant,” Hercule told us. “Sergeant Briggs was the fella who hired me, and he always hated my guts. Never hid away from saying it, too. Despite my record, he’d look me up and down and tell me that he could smell my conscience from a mile away, and that one day it’d see me betraying the empire. Turns out the bastard was right. And he knew it.”

“So he set all of this up as a test,” I said.

Hercule nodded. “Yup.”

“What happened?”

“Well…”

Hercule’s services were obviously no longer required by the empire, and as punishment for what he did, they sentenced him to lose his hand as a punishment. It should have been a straight hanging, in fairness, but Hercule had banked some credit and spared himself from death.

Linc eyed him. “My arithmetic isn’t the best, but you have two hands.”

“And Sergeant Briggs and the three fellas he got to tie me up are in the ground. But here I am. Ready to run this here place, if you’ll have me.”

The three of us conferred. Linc expressed his doubts as to his experience in running a tavern as well as his trustworthiness, given he’d betrayed his employer. Even if his employer was tasking him with rounding up deserters. Hilly told him, “Who gives a shit? This is a game and the tavern isn’t real.”

“That’s your answer to everything.”

“Well? So what? Live a little! This Hercule guy seems fun.”

I studied Hercule. “Tell me something. Is the empire going to come looking for you?”

He shook his head. “Not likely. Arranged it so they thought I drowned crossing the Perce.”

“Perce?” said Linc.

“A beast of a river down south. And in any case. The Hercule you’re seeing now isn’t how they remember me. I ain’t stupid. I visited an artificer.”

“Let’s just hire him,” I said.

Hilly and Linc agreed. Hilly, especially, seemed enraptured by the strange man.

And so the Blade and Grunder tavern had a manager. Hercule moved into the hut I had made for him. He had a giant stuffed grizzly bear that arrived soon after on a carriage that he’d hired to bring the rest of his stuff. He put his stuffed bear outside his hut, and he told Hanz and Franz that he’d killed it himself.

“His name’s Great George,” he said. “And he’s lucky. Anytime you want some good luck, take a copper outta your ma or pa’s purse, and leave it here by Big George’s feet.”

Hearing this, Hilly said, “I absolutely love this guy.”

It didn’t take long for Hercule to get started with his duties. I assigned him starting funds of ten gold. He ordered a dozen beer barrels from a brewery called Thorpe’s Creek, who were situated five miles away near Tempest Quarry and sold the bulk of their wares to the quarry workers.

“So, I ordered two barrels of pale ale, two golden ale, and something spicy,” said Hercule.

“Spicy?”

“Yup. Two whole barrels of Firecracker Death Whiskey. Don’t worry though. It’s nicer than it sounds.”

As well as organizing the selection of beers, Hercule had grand plans for a food menu.

“When a guy or a girl drinks enough beer, they get hungry. An’ when they get hungry, we need to make money. I learned some recipes from my ma, and I put a menu together.”

Hercule handed me a piece of paper.

Blade and Grunder

Food Menu:

Chicken Pot Pie – 2 silvers

“That it? One item?” I said. “What about if you get a vegetarian visiting? We need to make money of those guys too.”

Hercule chewed on a grass stalk. Though he felt it made him look cool, I had seen him in the fields earlier one morning collecting a bunch of stalks ready for later chewing. This kind of preparation robbed the action of its coolness somewhat.

“Vegetarians?” he said.

“Yup.”

“Gimme that back here.”

I handed him the menu. He was gone for two hours, during which time I worked on the hamlet plan I had been drawing.

Later, when he knocked on my door, he handed me a new menu.

“Here ya go. We’re catering for everyone now.”

Blade and Grunder

Food Menu:

Chicken Pot Pie – 2 silvers

Chicken Pot Pie (without the chicken) – 2 silvers

I was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, we’d chosen the wrong guy to run the Blade and Grunder. Then Hercule started laughing, his chiseled and stubble-lined jaw grinding with every hearty guffaw.

“Only yanking yer chain.”

He took the menu back from me and gave me another. This time, it was a proper menu with ten entries. Some were vegetarian and some weren’t, but all of them sounded delicious. There was beef stew, chicken pot pie, mixed bean chili.

“I reckon I’m gonna be spending a lot of time in the tavern,” I told him.

Hercule made some last-minute alterations to the tavern itself, bringing Big George the grizzly inside and propping him next to the bar. In his big, grizzly hand he put a clay bowl, with a sign above that said ‘tips’.

On the long wooden wall on the right side of the tavern he fixed wooden shelves – which showed lower quality craftsmanship than mine, I was glad to see - on which he arranged a bunch of odds, ends, and artifacts that he’d picked up on his travels. There was a bleached skull that belonged to some kind of lizard, an ornamental pipe made from the tusks of a fire-phant, and a strange wicker figurine that looked like a voodoo doll.

Showing me around the tavern and dragging me from spot to spot with the enthusiasm of a kid, he urged me along to the last shelf. There were four books on it.

“Figured we could have a little library here. A person’s gotta read. I always say that. Gotta make time to put your nose in a book. Reading’s like manure for the mind. Lets it grow. Folks can donate books here and take books away to read.”

“What’s to stop them just stealing the books?”

“You ain’t ever heard of an honor system, Josh? Is a community library a foreign concept to you?”

“I’m from the city. No such thing as the trust system. But I reckon this could work.”

Finally, after all of that, the Blade and Grunder was ready for business. Hercule took a sign outside and placed it by the front door. On it he wrote, ‘Soup of the Day – Beer. 5 coppers per glass.’

“Like my sign?” he said, barely containing a laugh.

“It’s a hoot.”

The tavern’s first customers were me, Hilly, Linc, Gorgal, and Frenrita. It was a Sunday so their forge was left cool, and the kids were out back in the stable that I’d made, spending time with Yulf the horse and Polli the mule. In a short space of time Yulf had developed a friendship with Hanz, whereas Polli seemed to be in love with Franz and wanted to follow him everywhere.

I took a moment to appraise the Blade and Grunder.

Standing there, I looked around with a critical eye. The place was small, and my crafting and carpentry low levels showed in the structure itself and the furnishings scattered around. It could have used an extra floor, I reckoned, and the ground floor needed to be bigger.

Negatives aside, the place had a cozy feel to it. From the stone hearth that glowed red as it chewed through the logs Hercule had set on it, to the candles in their brass fittings that flickered along the walls. In this way, its small size was actually a plus, I guessed. It made it seem more like a home than a tavern. A place to come and relax with your friends, drinking nice beer and eating Hercule’s stew while the rain fell outside, and it was okay because you knew that you wouldn’t have to go out in it for a while now.

Yup, I could easily see this place becoming the heart of Blade’s Rest.

From behind the bar, Hercule said, “Right then. Are you folks gonna buy something, or what?”

“Buy? This is our tavern!” said Hilly.

“We’re gonna pay like everyone else,” I said. “No point drinking up our own supply, is there?”

Frenrita ordered a ginger beer while Gorgal bought four mugs of pale ale. When Frenrita questioned why he would buy four, he said that he was going to drink four anyway, so why not just order them all at once?

Hilly, Linc, and I took a table across from theirs, and Hercule brought over three golden ales, followed by three bowls of beef stew sometime later, served with generous chunks of rye bread.

We ate our food and drank our drinks and we talked about plans for the hamlet, and in a weird way it was easy, maybe too easy, to forget that none of this really existed when we took off our VR sets and logged out of the game.

But that didn’t seem to matter because the glow of the fire felt real enough, and the feeling I got when I heard the wind outside but knew it couldn’t tease its way into the tavern felt even more so.

Chapter 15

Blade’s Rest

Hamlet: Level 2

Population: 8 people, 1 horse, 1 mule

Non-residential buildings: 1 tavern, 1 blacksmith’s forge

With all the crafting and carpentry I had done lately, a couple of things happened.

First, my consistent skill use gave me enough EXP to take me to level 4. This gave me four attribute points to spend, as well as unlocking a new skill slot for me to fill.

Faced with four attribute points that I needed to allocate, my instinct was to put a point into strength. Just to bulk me up a little.

But the three of us had already discussed this.

“Hilly can take care of defense,” said Linc. “I’ll be learning potions and that kinda thing, as well as scouting, map-marking, and gathering resources. And you can take care of the building.”

“You’re happy for me to just build stuff? Nothing else?” I said.

Hilly agreed. “Sure, you could sink a point into strength and feel like your defense is a little better. But that’s a waste of a point. It’d be like me putting points into intelligence just for the hell of it. All it’d do is waste a point I could have used to get stronger. If you’re building a race car, you don’t add a towbar to the back just in case you might wanna hitch a caravan to it.”

I had seen the sense and agreed with them at the time. It was just strange for me to have a completely non-combat character. I’d never done it before, and it would take some getting used to.

Putting three points into intelligence and one into agility, I got a small boost to my crafting speed, and a much bigger boost in terms of what I could actually create. By now, my improvisation list was almost a hundred items long, and my carpentry list was catching up.

As well as this, I advanced to the ‘skilled’ rank in improvisation, and ‘novice’ in carpentry, which earned me two crafting chests as a reward.

The chests appeared in my inventory. Feeling excited, I headed into my hut. By now, my hut was looking a little more like a home. I had a clay oven that vented smoke out into the open air. I had used carpentry to create a wardrobe, in which I stored the various in-game clothes I had been collecting on visits to Westfell.

I took off my boots and left them by the door, and I headed over to my bed and sat down on it. I took the crafting chests from my inventory and placed them on the floor in front of me.

Opening them both, I got a notification.

Crafting chest opened x2

You have received:

- ‘Measure twice, cut once’ sign.

When placed in a crafting workshop, this sign slows down crafting speed but improves product quality

-[Good] Mallet

-[Great] Carpentry tool belt

- Crafter’s chest

A 100-space inventory chest small enough to fit in most rooms

- Craftprints maker

A tool that allows you to create your own craftprints.

The ‘Measure Twice, Cut Once’ sign had a varnished oak frame, and in the center was the black silhouette of a handsaw. I had heard the saying before but I wasn’t much of a craftsman outside of BaS, so I’d never given it much thought. This sign was special, though, with its effect of increasing product quality at the expense of speed.

So far, I was finding that sometimes I needed to make things quickly, and sometimes I needed to make things well. Crude tools for the grunders, for instance, didn’t need great craftsmanship. But creating a tavern? A hut? I needed to do those things right.

Getting the sign also made me surer of something I had been thinking about for a while – I needed to create my own workshop.

I told Hilly and Linc about this one night in the Blade and Grunder. Hercule had made a ‘specials’ menu, which was a special dish that changed day-to-day. He wrote the specials menu on a chalk slate, and he rested this on Big George’s other paw so that the grizzly was holding the clay tip bowl and the menu.

Usually, the special of the day was made from fish he bought from Atticus and Argyle, but sometimes Hilly’s daytime hunting supplied it. Tonight it was rarebit shepherd’s pie.

“A rabbit shepherd pie?” said Hilly. “Who the hell’s out there shepherding rabbits?”

Linc and Hercule laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Rarebit, not rabbit.”

“Aren’t they words for the same thing?”

“Nope,” said Hercule. “See, a rabbit is an animal that hops around and lives in a burrow. Whereas rarebit is a dish where hot cheese sauce is served over toasted bread, okay? There ain’t any rabbit in it. And a shepherd’s pie is minced beef cooked with onions and carrots and gravy, and covered with mashed potato. I make that, and then I put the cheese sauce on top, which becomes Hercule’s Famous Rarebit Shepherd’s Pie. At least, I’m hoping it’ll become famous.”

None of us had ever eaten rarebit, though Linc and I had heard of it. Linc had tasted shepherd’s pie when he went to Cardiff, in Wales, for his cousin Stew’s wedding, once.

The dish was delicious. It cost us five silver each for a helping – I convinced Hilly not to just take stuff for free – and we each paid for seconds. I ate my second helping slower and made it last, and by the end of it my bowl was clean and I was glad I could tick both rarebit and shepherd’s pie off my list of culinary adventures. Course, I couldn’t really tick them off. Not in real life, given that the food was just pixels and the ‘taste’ was the immersion tweaking my brain. But still.

“That’s what I like to see,” said Hercule, taking away our bowls. “Clean cutlery. Sign that I did something right.”

“It was great,” said Linc.

“Then maybe you ought to head over to Big George over there and fill that bowl of his.”

“Huh?”

“He wants a tip,” I said.

“Oh. Right.”

We had a quick game of poker while we drank our after-dinner beers. This was another of Hercule’s additions. He reckoned a tavern wasn’t a tavern without a deck of cards. What’s more, he was a big lover of board games, and he was going to visit Westfell on his next day off and buy some.

“Which reminds me,” he said. “We ain't discussed this yet. But either the tavern has to close for at least one day per week, or you need to give me funds to employ someone to tend the bar. A man needs a day off.”

“You know what?” said Hilly. “I’ll cover your shifts.”

I don’t think any of us expected that.

She shrugged. “What? My older brother worked in a bar. I always wanted to do it. I’m especially looking forward to someone getting drunk and rowdy and being able to throw them out on their asses.”

Linc and I exchanged looks. “Works for me,” I said. “As long as you keep your hands off the gold.”

“What do you take me for?”

“A potential thief,” I said. Linc laughed.

“Stop by in the mornin’,” said Hercule, “and I’ll show ya the ropes.”

We finished our game of poker. We were only gambling for one or two coppers each round, but Linc soon got cleaned out. He’d never played before and although he understood the rules, the fella couldn’t bluff for shit. He just didn’t have a lying bone in his body.

It came down to Hilly and me. I was an okay bluffer, whereas Hilly was an expert at it. No matter when I thought I’d caught her tell, she’d always end up making me look foolish.

But patience was her problem. She got bored, and she went all-in on a round when she shouldn’t have, and I cleaned her out.

“Damn it. Stupid game,” she said.

It was the dead of night now and we could see it pressing in against the tavern windows. Hercule had bought some glass from a traveling merchant and I had fitted the windows, and right now dark of night was trying its best to get in, only to be beaten back by the cozy glow of the tavern candles. Rain pattered on the panes, but it was a gentle rain and it was nice hearing it because we were all inside in this warm tavern, and we didn’t have to go outside just yet.

We weren’t the only ones enjoying being inside the warm tavern tonight.

In the corner of the room was an NPC rug seller named Ben-John and his fourteen-year-old son, Clyde-Dale. They’d been on their way to Westfell when an axel snapped in their carriage. That pretty much ended their travels for the night. Though we didn’t have an upper floor in the Blade and Grunder, they paid 5 silvers to sleep on the floor, out of the cold and the rain. Hercule had cooked them some rarebit shepherd’s pie and served dandelion cordial to the boy, and a beer to his father. Now, Clyde-Dale was stretched out across one bench with his fur coat pulled over him, while his father quietly sipped his beer and read a book.

I turned my attention back to Hilly and Linc.

“So I’ve been thinking,” I said. “If you guys don’t mind, I’m gonna make myself a workshop. I’ll place it on the outskirts of town so it doesn’t mess up our town planning. You two okay with that?”

“Nope,” said Linc.

“Huh?”

“You promised you’d make me some kinda lab to do my potioneering, remember?”

Hilly, who was sitting with her boots up on the table and leaning back in her chair so it was precariously balanced on two legs, said, “And I wanted a leather tanning lodge and an armory.”

“I really promised those things?”

Hilly and Linc exchanged a sly look which I pretended not to see. “Sure did.”

“Alright then. Looks like I’m gonna be busy.”

In real life, I’d gotten into a habit where I worked for 10 hours every day on BaS. At twenty bucks an hour, I was getting paid 1000 every week just to build Blade’s Rest. It seemed crazy to me that a guy could earn his living this way, so I could only surmise that it must have been worth it for the devs to employ me.

I didn’t work 10 hours straight, of course. I needed to eat and Baxter needed to go for short walks. It also wasn’t a good idea to stay in full immersion VR for such long stretches, so I broke it up into 4 sessions at two and a half hours each. If I’d stayed in the game for too long it would have kicked me out for an enforced break, but even so, I knew my own limits. I took the weekends off.

Still, ten hours per day was a helluva lot of time, and the three of us began to really grow Blade’s Rest. I touched up the hamlet fence, making it stronger and more compact. Hilly and Linc dug a well, while Linc established better supply lines to the loggers in Crookshack woods and a logging company out west, playing them against each other by telling each of them that the other was offering cheaper prices.

One day, Gaben Flintlock and his company of miners returned from the Thunderstrike mountains. Their mules were pulling tarpaulin-covered carriages filled with supplies of iron, copper, and other ores that they’d mined over the last month.

Gaben, as ever, didn’t ride with his company but instead traveled on a black stallion. His coat was covered in dust and he had the pale face of a man who’d spent a lot of time underground. On his back was a pickaxe secured by a leather strap, which indicated that Gaben worked just as hard as the fellas he paid.

He rode into the hamlet, pausing at the sign and then headed into the center. Soon, the rhythmic chink-chink-chink coming from Gorgal’s forge ceased, and the giant blacksmith emerged.

“Ah, it is Mr. Flintlock! Pickaxes of Gorgal are good, yes?”

Gaben nodded. “Sure are, my friend. Held up well, and boy, did we put strain on them.”

“Then you are back soon, why?”

“Because those goddamned mountains are swarming with monsters. My men ain't paid to be fighting off goddamned creatures that creep outta nowhere and snatch ya away. Almost had a mutiny, lemme tell ya. So I said to them, ‘boys, let's load up what we got, and we’ll pay a militia to clear out the mountains’. It won me back a little popularity, but I still ain’t their favorite person, lemme tell ya.”

I strode forward to meet Gaben, who dismounted and shook my hand. He stood with his hands on his hips, his coat spread behind him.

“Place looks different.”

“We’ve been busy since you were last here,” I said.

“Well. We won’t be staying long, at any rate. Just we’ve been traveling a while and needed a rest, and just so happened that we were close by.”

The miners’ carriages pulled up to Blade’s Rest soon after Gaben’s arrival. The men climbed out of the back of two of the carriages, while the driver of the third hopped down from his driver’s seat and checked on all the mules. He grabbed four wooden buckets which he held by looping the wire handles over his right forearm.

He nodded at the hamlet well. “You mind?”

“Go ahead,” I told him.

Soon, Hanz and Franz came sprinting toward him. I had decided to make them both Blade’s Rest’s official stableboys, and I paid them a salary of 2 coppers per week. I would have been more generous, but Frenrita forbade it. She wanted the boys to learn that first came a work ethic, then came its rewards.

The boys surrounded the carriage driver, who regarded them with an amused smile.

“Mister, we will take your animals to hay.”

The driver glanced at Gaben, who nodded.

“Well,” said the driver, “You better take these buckets then. And watch out for Jessie. She kicks when she’s hungry.”

The boys excitedly took care of the mules, while the driver sat beside the huge axel wheel of the carriage and rolled himself a cigarette.

With so many people here at once, I saw an opportunity to make some headway into the hamlet level three requirement of having 50 people spend at least 4 hours here.

Before I could say anything, Gaben stuck a thumb in his belt and spoke to me.

“Like I said. We won’t stay long,” said Gaben. “There ain't much in this place worth sticking for, I mean no offense. But it’s been a long road and it’s been a dusty one. We need to cool our heels a minute.”

There must have been more than twenty men and women here, which would put us almost halfway toward achieving a pass-through traffic of 50 people, who stayed for at least four hours. That was a decent chunk toward earning the status of hamlet- level 3.

“Actually, Gaben,” I said, “We just opened a tavern. See it over there?”

Gaben put his hand against his forehead and squinted. “The Blade and Grunder. What the fuck’s a grunder?”

“Never mind that.”

“And what’s that sign out front say? The one written in chalk.” He squinted, reading Hercule’s chalkboard sign. “‘Tip: Fat people are harder for brigands to kidnap. Stay safe by eating lots here.’ What the hell kinda tip is that and why’s it outside a tavern?”

“Yeah, Hercule’s the manager, and he’s got a thing about signs. Don’t worry about it. But the guy’s a helluva cook, and he’s got a good nose for beer. There’s always a hearth burning. Why don’t you and your company go have something to eat?”

Gaben glanced at his men, some of whom were leaning against the carriage and smoking, while others were just sitting on the ground, clearly exhausted.

“If it keeps ‘em away from mutiny, then it’s an idea and a half,” he said. Then he turned toward his company. “Guys? This Josh fella says they’ve opened a tavern, at long last! Get your asses over here. First round’s on me!”

The exhaustion left the miners’ faces in a flash and they practically stampeded into the hamlet and toward the Blade and Grunder.

Inside the tavern, Hercule was busy positioning a small piano he’d ordered from Polite & Fine Instruments in Westfell, paying for it using his own money. He’d really leaned into managing the tavern, and didn’t seem to care about spending his money on it. As long as he broke even and had food and a roof over his head – not to mention attracting no heat from the empire – then he was content. I reckoned I could learn a lot from a guy like him.

When he saw a sea of famished miners flood in, he got a start.

“The hell?” he said.

He quickly retreated to behind the bar as a stream of miners flooded in, clamoring for drinks and food and girls. Hercule said he could help with two of those things, but not the third. Coin purses were unclipped from belts and slammed down on the counter, and a dozen voices yelled orders at him.

“Alright, alright!” said Hercule, seeming stressed for the first time since I met him.

I went behind the bar and started helping him serve them. After I messaged Hilly on teamchat, she abandoned her hunting and came back to the Blade and Grunder, where she helped, too. Linc didn’t answer because, as always, he was ass-deep in the woodland searching for some kind of elusive plant.

When the initial flood of miners was satisfied, Hercule could deal with the ones that trickled in after that on his own. Luck had it that his system of food preparation was to cook everything in batches in the morning, and then heat it up in a cauldron or clay oven on demand. This meant it didn’t take him too long to serve twenty bowls of lamb and ale stew. He ran out of bread after thirteen bowls, so he sent Hanz and Franz to Atticus ‘n’ Argyle’s Fishery to see if they had some spare to sell to him.

The afternoon wore into the evening, passing way beyond the four hours we needed the miners to stay. An exhausted group of miners became a drunken group. One of them grabbed Hilly’s ass, so she gave him a slap that would have made even Big George wince, had he been real. Then, when Linc turned up sodden with rain and covered in dirt, a woman miner grabbed his ass, and he blushed. Hilly, incensed on his behalf, offered to fight the woman outside, but Hercule broke it up.

“You got that slap for free,” he told Hilly. “I saw it, and I marked it. But the next person to throw a punch in this tavern is gonna get thrown out of a window. The Blade and Grunder ain’t a fighting pub!”

The miners ended up sleeping on the tavern floor. Hercule took advantage, charging them 5 silvers per head for the honor. When they woke up in the morning, it was to the smell of bacon sizzling in a cast-iron pan.

“Grub’s up,” he told the group, who one by one grumbled awake. Some of them rushed outside to throw up, while others asked Hercule to get the beer flowing so they could drink enough to keep their hangovers at bay.

It had been a profitable enough night and morning for the Blade and Grunder, but it turned out that Gaben was so perturbed by the show that his miners had made of themselves, that he asked to have a word with me in private.

“Listen,” he said. “I don’t want word getting around that Gaben Flintlock employs a buncha drunks. Let’s keep this quiet, huh? What’ll it take for those lips of yours to stop flappin’?”

I hadn’t intended on flapping my lips to anyone. I mean, who was I gonna tell?

Even so, it would be remiss of me not to take advantage.

“I need metals,” I said. “Iron, copper steel. But I need it at a discount.”

“Done.”

“That isn’t all.”

“Mr. Boothe, come now. I don’t reckon-”

“Your miners really looked bad last night,” I said. “Fighting. Puking everywhere. Getting naked and swinging their cocks around.”

“They really did that?”

“Sure,” I said, knowing no such thing had occurred.

“Damn it. Not again. I told ‘em about doing that! Well. You better let me know what else ya need.”

“Not much,” I said. “Just...I don’t know…twenty men holding twenty shovels. I got a few more wells that need digging.”

Chapter 16

It wasn’t just highly intelligent NPCs that visited Blade’s Rest. Players flittered through the hamlet every so often. They were mostly passing players whose mini maps must have pinged and alerted them to the hamlet nearby.

We didn’t have any quests to offer and there were no colleges or masters who offered training or anything like that, so they didn’t stay for very long. Occasionally, players would see Gorgal’s forge and ask if they could buy his services as a blacksmith, but he usually refused. He had another contract with Gaben Flintlock, and he didn’t have time for odd repairs or skill training.

This meant that capturing passing traffic was difficult. We had a tavern, sure, but nobody really had any reason to visit Blade’s Rest, so they didn’t know the tavern existed.

To remedy this, I had made four signs which I intended to place at certain points on the travelers’ roads. The way I saw it, weary merchants and wandering men at arms and the like were our target audience. We just needed a way to funnel them in.

At first, I wrote on the signs ‘Food and grub this way.’ Hercule saw what I was doing, and he wasn’t happy. He paced around my signs, tutting and shaking his head.

“You gotta think differently, Josh. You need a sign that grabs a fella’s attention. Lemme work on ‘em.”

Hercule stood outside the tavern with the chalkboards all laid out flat on the floor. In his hand he held a piece of chalk. He walked to and fro, muttering to himself and stopping occasionally to kneel by a sign and then, overcome with inspiration, scribble something down.

An hour later, he announced that he was ready.

“Some of my best work,” he told us.

Hilly, Linc, and I each took a sign and set out from Blade’s Rest, crossing over the scutch grass fields and heading toward the traveler’s roads. We didn’t see a single mob or hostile creature all the way there, which was because Hilly’s incessant hunting and patrols had changed their behavior patterns.

Hilly seemed disgusted with the sign she was carrying. “Free beer, Topless barmaids, and False advertising?”

Linc laughed. “Prefer yours to mine,” he said. His sign was a flow diagram. At the top it said ‘Is everything okay?’, with yes and no options below it. At the bottom, both options led to ‘Then come inside and have a drink.’

The sign that I was carrying said ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.’ Not Hercule’s finest work, I had to say.

We left the signs at four separate crossings on the travelers’ roads, with small maps drawn on them directing folks to Blade’s Rest.

While we waited for this to draw more traffic to our hamlet, I got to work on Linc’s potioneering workshop.

Looking it up online, it seemed that a potioneer needed a big workshop, because they needed to fit a big ass cauldron in there, and they sometimes produced potions that required special storage. Not to mention, a potioneer always had a pantry overflowing with hundreds or maybe thousands of different herbs, flowers, and spices.

As well as that, there needed to be a vent on the roof to carry away fumes so that the potioneer didn’t suffocate when dealing with certain potions. Finally, the roof had to be completely secure from the elements, on account of potioneers storing potions that sometimes reacted to cold, heat, or rain.

Factoring all of this in, I planned to build Linc’s potioneering workshop in the far north of the Blade’s Rest boundaries, well away from the tavern, residential hamlets, and Gorgal’s blacksmithing shop.

I was about to use my carpentry skill to construct a 20 x 40-foot wooden workshop when a moment of sanity came to me. Heading to Linc’s hut to talk to him, I found it empty. A quick check of my map of Gobbler’s Creek showed that he was south of Black Salt Lake, in the marshland east of the Chief Oak’s grunder village.

It wasn’t surprising that he was all the way down there. Ever since our trade agreement, the grunders had gradually warmed up to us. Sometimes I even saw parties of them prowling the outskirts of Blade’s Rest. Hilly, insistent that they were a scouting party preparing for an invasion, grabbed a sword and went out to meet them. I didn’t reckon this was the start of a grunder attack, so I didn’t go with her.

When she returned, she was laughing. “Poor little bastards were terrified of me,” she said.

“What did they want?”

“Well, they had no weapons. No armor. Nothing like that. But Gorgal came out to talk to them for me. He said they were just curious, they said. They saw the signs on travelers’ road about the Blade and Grunder, and some of ‘em can read English. At least, they can recognize the English name for their species. They were wondering why it was written on a sign.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I tried explaining what a tavern was to them, which they struggled with because they’d never heard of one. I don’t know if Gorgal interpreted it wrong or something, but somehow, they got the impression that a tavern is a place where we serve cooked grunders.”

“Ah, that’s all we need. Well, if we see any more, I’ll set them straight.

With Linc miles way, I had to use teamchat to talk to him.

Josh: Got a problem

Linc: What is it, buddy?

Josh: So. The potioneering workshop you wanted…

Linc: It’s ready?

Josh: Afraid not. To build it safely it needs to be made out of stone. Last thing we need is you exploding something and a fire spreading through Blade’s Rest.

Linc: C’mon, buddy. Tell me you can still do it. Got my heart set on it.

Josh: It just might take a little more time, is all.

The thought of a fire spreading through Blade’s Rest actually got me a little worried. Sure, I could craft stuff at the click of a button, but I didn’t want to have to start from scratch. And what if some lunatic started launching fire arrows over the hamlet fences? What if lightning struck us and sent one hut up in flames? It wouldn’t take long for everything to burn down.

I couldn’t rebuild all the huts using stone yet, because that was a completely different skill. So instead, I did a couple of things to minimize the risk of fire.

Firstly, we already had three wells in the hamlet, two of which Gaben Flintlock’s miners had dug for us. Each well had a rope and a bucket. At my crafting station, I created eight more buckets, four for each well. I left these beside the wells but not attached to them so they could be filled and carried away if a fire broke out.

I wasn’t done there, because a few buckets of water weren’t going to cut it. I headed to the travelers’ road and waited for a carriage to go past. Merchants went up and down the roads all day, since various forks headed to places like Westfell, Dustpost, and Reenview.

First, a sorry-looking mule pulled a sorry-looking cart, on the back of which was a bunch of scrap metal. The driver was an old man with a lazy eye, and for some reason he was peeling potatoes as he drove the carriage, idly tossing the skins out onto the road.

He stopped the carriage at the road beside me. “Where you goin', son?” he asked me.

“Cappa Creek quarry. Or as near as you can get me.”

“Sorry. Ain’t going in that direction. Luck to ya, though.”

It was a full BaS hour before a carriage finally stopped that was going my way. It was a fine-looking carriage being pulled by four horses with shiny, healthy-looking bodies and strong muscles. It was driven by a woman wearing riding leathers, with a shiny silver necklace and gleaming jade gem around her neck. Whatever she was transporting was hidden by a tarpaulin roof on the back of the carriage.

“Well,” she said, slowing down. “At least there’s a nice view around here. Gobbler’s Creek is such a dreary shithole.”

“Need a ride to Cappa Creek Quarry,” I said. “I’ll pay.”

“I’ll take you as far as Hunter’s Pass.”

A quick check of my map revealed that Hunter’s Pass was close to the quarry, maybe ten minutes’ walk away. So I flipped a copper coin to her. She caught it without looking.

“Climb aboard. And try not to rile them up.”

“Them?”

She smirked. “You’ll see.”

‘Them’ referred to the half dozen macaque monkeys that were resting in cages. They had plenty of room and plenty of food and drink. In fact, in terms of space, they were gonna have a much more comfortable ride than me. It left me thinking that I should have taken a page out of Linc’s book and walked. The monkeys got agitated when they saw me, but quickly settled down when I climbed on board and sat down.

From there it didn’t take long to reach Hunter’s Pass, which was a giant hunting lodge where folks could purchase stealth leathers, crossbows, and certain skill training from the hunters who worked there. I didn’t visit the lodge, instead heading northwest, where the quarry soon loomed into view, along with the silhouettes of hundreds of quarry workers laboring on removing chunks from a cliffside.

Reaching Cappa Creek Quarry I sought out the supervisor, who was a half-orc woman named Glenda Gildfree. Her face was human-looking yet colored pond green, and her lower fangs stuck out above her top lip, even when her mouth was closed. Her ears were pointed sharp at the tips, and her eyes shone orange. But yeah. She looked human aside from all of that.

“Sorry. I’m not hiring,” she said when she saw me. “Though the gods know that I need to, with the strike and all. But the turkey fuckers upstairs won’t release enough gold for me to pay nobody.”

I didn’t know which ‘turkey fuckers’ she was referring to, but I reckoned it was unwise of them to get her so angry. She had a look about her that said she could turn mean if she ever wanted to. Luckily, she didn’t seem to want to turn mean towards me. In fact, she smiled, revealing more of her bottom fangs. Her top row of teeth were decidedly human, and they were a nice white color rather than the yellow I was accustomed to seeing on orcs.

“I’m here to buy some stone,” I said.

“Which outfit ya with?”

“Outfit?”

“Builders’ outfit. Who do you work for?”

“I work for myself. I guess you could say I work for Blade’s Rest, if you insisted.”

“Blade’s Rest? I’ve never heard of them.”

“It’s a place. Anyway. I need-”

She shook her head. “No way, no how. We don’t sell to the public. We got contracts with five different outfits, and with the workers strike not showing signs of stopping, we’re struggling as it is. Sorry, bub. I can’t sell you anything.”

I hadn’t come all the way out here, riding in a carriage full of monkeys, just to get turned away. Learning the language skill and then spending attribute points on intelligence had hopefully given me an under-the-hood charisma boost.

I decided to have another try.

“If things are as bad as you say they are and you can’t fulfill your contracts, then it sounds like you’re gonna lose one or two of them. If that happens, don’t you reckon it’ll be good to have a backup? A coin in the hand is worth more in the bush, or something.”

She bit her lip with her fangs. “I’m listening.”

“I’m the head builder for Blade’s Rest a haml…a settlement southwest of here. I don’t need a great deal of stone today, sure. But if we’re happy with your products and your prices…well. It might not be such a bad thing to be supplying a whole settlement with stone.”

Glenda drummed her fingers on her arm. Her shirt was so thin it was almost see-through, and I could just about make out orcish war tattoos on her right forearm.

“Maybe it couldn’t hurt to have things in the pipeline in case this all goes tits up,” she said. “Alright. Let’s see what you need.”

Later, back in Blade’s Rest, I continued my work on improving fire safety. As well as buying some stone that we’d need to start building stone buildings, I had purchased lots of salt from Glenda. This was a cheap yet effective fire prevention method. At least for now, while Blade’s Rest was still quite small.

I crafted eight more buckets, and I filled each of them with salt. I left them in strategic parts of the hamlet, particularly next to Gorgal’s forge, the Blade and Grunder, and the fire pit in the center of the hamlet. Around the firepit, I built a second ring of stones, along with a sign instructing people who used it to make sure the flames were extinguished and the embers cold before leaving it.

That was about it for fire safety, I reckoned. The sooner we could build stone buildings, the better. And from now on, I was gonna stop making structures with thatched roofs. That was just asking for trouble.

Chapter 17

Linc and I headed into Westfell, where it was the third Sunday of the month. This meant that many of the shops were closed. This wasn’t due to religious reasons but for a decree made by Phillip Palmer, mayor of Westfell. He was a populist mayor and part of his election campaign promised to compensate every shop owner and their employees who halted trading on the third Sunday and spent time with their families. Unlike many folks, he actually stuck to his promises. Thus, Westfell was quiet on the third Sunday of every month.

There was one shop that I knew never closed, however. We headed to Scribbler’s Row, where we were met with bookshops showing closed sign after closed sign.

Linc grumbled uncharacteristically about it. “I’m wasting prime foraging time here. Do you know there’s a plant in Crookshack that’s so rare, one-of-a-kind that it grows in just one place in the whole of Bas? Not only that, but once you pick it, its location changes to a different part of the woods, and it’s so small it’s almost impossible to spot.”

“What’s so special about it?” I said.

“Well…the things I just said, for one thing. But rarity aside, it’s got some crazy effects. I don’t wanna tell you yet – I might never find it. Man, I hope I do, though.”

“You reckon you will?”

He shrugged. “I’ve drawn a scale map of the woods and separated it into grids, and I’m taking time to mark each grid in turn. I’m also writing down the locations of all the other herbs and stuff, because most things grow back in the same places.”

“How many grids you searched?”

“Four,” said Linc.

“And how many are left?”

“Eighty.”

“What?”

“I told you, I’m being thorough!”

Just before we reached Bryp’s book shop, I grabbed Linc. We stood still on the street. Across from us, an orc-gnome was walking along while holding his daughters’ hands. One girl had way more of the orcish side, the other was more gnome. Seeing me and Linc, he smiled and nodded and told us good morning. We repeated the same to him.

“What’ve we stopped for?” said Linc.

I gestured to the Forked Tongue shop sign.

“Now, I need you to go in there and buy me a skilltome on stonemasonry,” I said, putting ten gold coins into his hand and closing his fingers around them.

“Alright, but why don’t you do it?”

“I can’t. Just trust me.”

“This is weird. But alright. You better buy me some lunch like you promised.”

“Anything your belly desires,” I said.

Linc headed into Forked Tongue Books. As soon as I heard the usual shriek of Bryp’s demon bird, I started laughing to myself. The door slammed shut and I couldn’t hear the rest of what transpired.

Ten minutes later, Linc left the shop.

He pushed a big book against my chest. “What the fuck was that?” he said.

Seeing his face and hearing him swear for a rare time made me lose it again. “Did he do the dancing thing?”

“Yeah! Jumped up on the bloody counter and started talking in riddles and doing a jig.”

“Sorry, man. I just wanted you to see it for yourself.”

“He’s a weird, weird guy.”

“He’s a satyr,” I said. “But yeah. Let’s get some lunch.”

One of the few kinds of businesses that didn’t shut down every third Sunday of the month were taverns. Since lots of folks had a day of paid leave and nothing to do, it would have been ridiculous for taverns to close.

As it was, though, lots of the taverns were already full of families. We tried the Frisky Gardener, the Ape and Mongoose, even the Weeping Sore. None of them had a table going spare. The landlord of the Weeping Sore offered to let us dine in the stables out back, which he assured us had been mucked out only the day before, but we declined. Linc, however, took the opportunity to pocket some dried horse dung, which he said he could use in potions. I didn’t mind, since once it was in his inventory, I couldn’t smell it.

Disappointed and deflated, Linc and I headed back to Blade’s Rest. The sight of our hamlet’s wooden fence and Gorgal’s blacksmith shop with smoke venting from the roof caused a strange pang in me. A nostalgic one, almost, though nostalgia for a place that was still here. Maybe that was the wrong way to describe it since to me, nostalgia always applied to times gone by which exist in your imagination like sunsets that fade over time. I found it hard to put a pin in what the feeling was or why I was feeling it.

In the tavern, while we waited for Hercule to cook smoked paprika beef goulash for us, I told Linc about it. I thought he might think I was being stupid, but he nodded at me.

“It’s because you enjoy this place, or part of you does. Another part knows that it doesn’t exist. That when we log off, it might as well be gone. Full immersion starts to peel away a little when you really think about it. Nothing can replace the real world.”

“I don’t know. It does a good job of it.”

“Listen, if you didn’t live hundreds of miles away, and my leg wasn’t messed up, I’d take you foraging with me. Show you a little bit of nature and what’s really out there.”

“Maybe it can’t replace it,” I said. “But c’mon. I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t better than my apartment. I mean, I’m happy to see Baxter and take him out for a walk and stuff. But otherwise, this place beats the real world and it ain’t close. So it might not replace it…but it beats it.”

Hercule appeared at our table, holding in each hand a bowl made out of bread, inside of which was a generous helping of thick, amazing smelling goulash.

“Tuck in,” he said.

“Bon Appetit,” said Linc.

“Hey! You used it right this time!”

“High five?”

“Sure!”

Later, at night-time, I left the Blade and Grunder. Linc and I had stayed for one beer which then became two, and then three. Getting drunk in BaS wasn’t like in real life. You didn’t get ill, it didn’t impair your thoughts. It just gave you a warm glow in your belly and loosened your mood a little.

Walking to my hut, I saw movement on the roof of Frenrita and Gorgal’s hut. At first, I thought some kind of weird creatures were climbing on it, but as my eyes adjusted, I saw that it was Franz and Hanz. They had a telescope pointed at the night sky. Seeing me, they waved.

“Hello Mr. Boothe!”

“Does Gorgal know you’re up there?” I said.

“Nope.”

“Are you guys gonna get into any trouble?”

“Maybe.”

“I better tell him, then,” I said.

“No, wait, Mr. Boothe. We won’t be making trouble. We just want to watch the stars for a while and then we’ll go to bed.”

“Fine. But if Frenrita catches you, then I knew nothin’.”

“Thank you!”

With so much to accomplish in Blade’s Rest, I decided that now was as good a time as any to learn stonemasonry.

Outside my hut, I took some stone out of my inventory. I had bought a few different types from Glenda at the quarry, and tonight I was using the cheapest, which was slate.

I opened the book on stonemasonry. As with all skill tomes, only two pages of the book actually had content. The first was a very brief overview of stonemasonry. The second page detailed a step-by-step guide to crafting bricks using a hammer and chisel. To learn the skill, I had to make 50 bricks.

Sounds simple enough¸ I thought.

Unfortunately, simple doesn’t always mean easy. This was repetitive work for sure, and I’m not good with repetition.

It took me all of that night and well into the morning, and I still hadn’t finished the bricks. Sunlight cast a warm glow on my cheeks, which had been warm from my labors all night, but had quickly cooled when I stopped to rest. In real life, I’d never have been able to work all night after spending a day in Westfell and the Blade and Grunder, but the lack of needing to sleep was a real plus in BaS.

Hanz and Franz, I discovered, had fallen asleep on the roof of their hut. Seeing them snoozing, I shook my head. If you’re gonna sneak out at night, at least remember to sneak back in again. Rookie mistake.

Frenrita opened her hut door and shouted for them at the top of her lungs, shocking them awake. Hanz crawled across the roof and looked down on his mother, who hadn’t seen him yet.

He shot me a worried look from across the hamlet.

I shrugged. Nothing I can do for ya, buddy.

Franz yawned awake. Hanz clamped his hand over his brother’s mouth, but he was too late. Frenrita turned around, and although Hanz tried to hide out of view, she saw him.

“Hanz, you will come down now! Instant!”

Hanz said nothing. I watched the scene, laughing to myself, as Hanz grabbed Franz’s arm so he didn’t stir.

“Hanz! You think I am the stupid? I saw you.”

“No you didn’t,” said Hanz, in a stupid voice.

I shook my head, Buddy. Learn when to give it up.

“Hanz and Franz, you will come down. Instant. Come down and take punishment.”

This time, Franz stood up. “We are never coming down until you promise there will be no punishment! This is a strike!”

“A young boy strike!” added Hanz.

“And what you strike about?” asked Frenrita.

“Tyranny of mother.”

Frenrita grumbled to herself, then went inside to fetch Gorgal. The blacksmith was already dressed for the day since he worked the forge in the daytime. His beard, however, was half cut, and he was holding a pair of grooming scissors in his hand.

“What it is, damn it? I am grooming beard!”

“Come see your boys. See that they are monkeys,” said Frenrita.

Gorgal took one look at Hanz and Franz perched on their roof and locked in negotiations with their mother. Hanz’s face paled. I had never seen Gorgal mad, but every father must get mad sometimes.

But then Gorgal started laughing. Soon, Frenrita laughed, too. Then it was Hanz and Franz’s turns. Seeing that the situation was diffused, the boys climbed down.

It was then that Frenrita seized them both by the ears.

“Ha! Got you, naughty boys. Let’s see what chores are for you!”

With the family in their hut, the morning air of Blade’s Rest was peaceful once again. So, of course, I ruined it by resuming my hammering and chiseling on the slate.

Soon, however, I created my 50th slate brick.

When I did, I received a notification.

You have learned a skill – stonemasonry.

Rank: Apprentice

A skill involving cutting, preparing, and building with stone.

Do you wish to accept [Apprentice] stonemasonry?

Of course I accepted it. Making all those bricks by hand would have been pretty pointless otherwise. Stonemasonry took up my available skill slot, and it joined improvisation, carpentry, and languages in my skill list. That put me at possessing 3 crafting-focused skills, which left me 2 skills away from being able to group them together as a class.

Now, in real life, a guy couldn’t just spend a morning practicing stonemasonry and expect to then start building houses. But this wasn’t real life. BaS would suck if it was a true copy of the daily grind in the 2020s.

This being an escape from reality, learning stonemasonry meant something completely different here. In the north part of Blade’s Rest was the area where I had staked out a plot for Linc’s potioneering workshop.

Just like with carpentry, to use stonemasonry I needed to select an appropriate craftprint from the default list that came with the skill, make whatever modifications that I was permitted to, and then drag and drop the appropriate resources. In this case, I was using granite.

When I was happy, I had the workshop begin construction. As usual, a timer appeared on my screen. This one rotated much slower than before, which made sense, I guessed. Working with stone was harder. It should improve as I increased my intelligence and agility and ranked up my stone masonry.

Footsteps from my left marked the appearance of Hilly. She had a string of dead rabbits slung over her left shoulder. Her shirt was stained with blood and other fluids, but she didn’t seem to care. She gave me a cheerful smile.

“Got these specially for Hercule,” she said. “I figured he could make some rabbit rarebit. Whatcha doing?”

I told her that I was making Linc’s potioneering workshop, and that I’d start work on her leather tanning workshop soon afterward.

“Tanning workshop slash armory,” she said.

“Right. We really should employ more builders, though. The way this place is growing, I’m not gonna be able to keep up with everything I need to build.”

“You’re doing a great job, bozo. This place would be nothing without ya. But this is why I’m beggin' ya to create my tanning workshop. I wanna contribute more. Way I figure it, I can hunt stuff and then do something with the hides and pelts.”

“You’re the one who provides Hercule most of his stock, and we eat in the Blade and Grunder every day. I’d say you’re pulling your weight. Plus, you’re in charge of defending this place.”

“Yet you’re the one who built the fence. I need to step up. And I will.”

With that, Hilly walked away.

Linc’s potioneering workshop was ready the next day. When I told him about it on teamchat, he came back from the woods straight away even though he was supposed to be out there for four days. He sprinted all the way back to Blade’s Rest. Linc had put most of his attribute points into agility, with a little going into intelligence to increase his perception. His souped-up agility meant that he was much quicker on his feet than Hilly or me and he got back much quicker than I expected.

When he saw his workshop, his eyes widened. I smiled. It was like seeing a kid get what he wanted for Christmas or something.

Linc rushed inside, darting from wall to wall. “Ingredients jars, potion storage. Hey! Look! A vent to make sure the hazardous fumes don’t kill me. Cool or what?”

“Yup, depending on your definition of the word,” said Hilly.

Linc went to his hut, returning soon after and dumping on the floor all of the ingredients he’d collected so far in BaS. Staring at the trove, I was in awe. There were so many things. Roots of all kinds of shapes and sizes. Different colored shrooms. Berries, leaves, herbs, plants, petals. Even weird, acorn-like balls that I couldn’t begin to know the use of.

He started sorting these into the various glass jars that were resting on the oak wood shelves that I’d pushed up against the east wall. When that was done, he took his field guide poster and stuck it up on the wall.

“So, how do you know which potions to make and stuff?” I said.

“The magic of the internet.”

“It’s that easy?”

“Well, I learned the foraging skill, and then the potioneering skill. Then I went out and collected all the ingredients. So I guess it’s not completely that easy. But yup. Once you have the ingredients, the skills, and a workshop, you can just look up recipes online. My success rate on making them is determined by the quality of ingredients and my potioneering skill.”

“Does that mean you could use a bunch of correct ingredients and there’s a chance that it still doesn’t work out?”

“Yup,” said Linc. “Like with you building this place.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t mean that in a bad way, buddy. You only learned stonemasonry this morning, right? Well. Look at that brick over there. It’s got a crack in it. And there’s another one with a crack over there.”

With a growing disappointment, I began to see more bricks with cracks in them.

“Damn it.”

Linc slapped my back. “Cheer up! You learned the skill a few hours ago! This place is sound enough, but the more you level your stonemasonry, the better you’ll get. And it’s the same with potioneering.”

“What are you gonna make first?” I said.

“That’s a surprise,” said Linc.

Chapter 18

Next up, I started work on Hilly’s tanning workshop slash armory. This, I soon realized, was going to be a lot different from the potioneering workshop.

Though Linc had thanked me enough times, I knew he wasn’t happy about the stone aesthetic of his workshop.

“It just…how can I say this? It just looks like some kinda medieval jail, Josh. I was hoping for a place that looked nice. Ya know? That I would enjoy spending time in.”

“That’s too bad. You’re gonna be doing things that might start fires, so we need to make sure it’s safe.”

“I know. I know. And I hope I don’t sound ungrateful.”

“Look, I get it. But my stonemasonry isn’t good enough for me to create something that looks nice yet. When I’m good enough, maybe I’ll remodel this place.”

“Thanks, Josh.”

I watched Linc enter his workshop, and I had to admit that it really was an ugly building. Still, at least I had made Linc see sense.

Hilly, however, asked me again and again to consider making the tanning workshop out of wood.

“I won’t be doing stuff that starts fires, so there’s no risk there. And I’ll keep a bucket of salt nearby in case, I don’t know, some freak accident happens.”

“Why’s it so important to make it out of wood?” I said.

“I just enjoy the rustic look of an old lodge. Even if it’s within sight of Linc’s ugly ass potioneering workshop.”

Truth be told I favored the lodge look, too, and Hilly was right. There wasn’t as great a fire risk with her occupation. I decided that the fewer stone monstrosities we had in Blade’s Rest, the better. I wanted this to be safe, but also idyllic.

I created Hilly’s workshop out of red cedar and modified the plan to make it look like the kind of cabin you’d find hidden deep within a leafy forest. The roof was slanted and it met in the middle, and on the right-hand side had a brick chimney so that Hilly could have a woodburning stove inside. It had a front decking with a short cedar overhanging roof to protect from rain, giving her the option to work inside or outside.

Inside the hut were two rooms. One of them was a storage area for completed hides and all of Hilly’s tools, in case she didn’t want to carry them around in her inventory. As a bonus, I included two inventory lock boxes with a hundred spaces inside each, which should be more than enough room for all her things for now.

The biggest room was where she would do all of her work. There was a great, long, oak workbench with enough space to fit furs or pelts or whatever it was she’d have to put on there, as well as enough room for her tools. I also reckoned that working with dead animals might not be so pleasant on a person’s nose, so I built in two windows that could be opened outwards vertically.

When I showed her the finished lodge, Hilly walked around it, impressed. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed watching her pace around it, a smile spreading across her face.

“I love it,” she said. “Thank you.”

“It’s got everything you need?”

“Yup.”

“So…what is all this stuff?”

“Well, I know it’s a tanning workshop, but I’m gonna be working on all kinds of hides, not just leather. But the tools are pretty simple.” She stood by a triangular-shaped metal object with two legs, on the end of which were hooks. It was attached to a chain. Hilly had bought it in Westfell.

“This here’s a gambrel. Lets me raise the animal up and down while I’m skinning. And said skinning is accomplished with this – a skinning knife.”

There were a few other tools such as her fleshing knife, an odor mask, and a tail stripper, as well as an apron and boots that Hilly would wear when she was working. It definitely wasn't work for the faint-hearted. I didn’t much have a problem with blood, but I sure wouldn’t want to be messing around with animal hides in BaS.

I didn’t see much of Linc or Hilly for the rest of that game day, nor all of the following one. I busied myself by working on my stone masonry.

Using limestone, which was durable and could be cut into lots of shapes and sizes, I created a winding path that ran from the village sign – which still just read ‘Blade’s Rest’ – and past Gorgal’s forge.

From there, it took a route through the center of the village, to our huts and our firepit and our clay oven. From there it branched north, east, south, and west.

To the north the pathway crossed empty space until it hit Linc’s potioneering workshop, with Hilly’s tanning shop across the way. West from the center point would take you to the Blade and Grunder, where the sign out front today read ‘Beer won’t solve your problems, but neither will water.’

The east and south of Blade’s Rest were as yet bare of structures, but it wouldn’t take long to fill them. In fact, it wouldn’t be too long before we needed to take down the hamlet fence and expand our boundaries, I reckoned. When I did, I’d have to consider building stone walls now that I had the stonemasonry skill.

By the time I was done, it was almost dusk and the air above the fields of Gobbler’s Creek were alive with the hoots of nocturnal birds leaving their nests to hunt mice amidst the swaying scutch stalks. The pathway wasn’t a dull grey like you’d see in a city center. I had chosen different hues of limestone, including white, grey, beige, and fissile brown, and I made different shaped cuts. This gave it a more pleasing look, less like a uniform city street and more like the pathway through some kind of old English garden.

I wasn’t done there, though. The fading daylight gave me an idea.

I created two dozen sturdy timber poles, and I planted these at various points around the village. Using my crafting table, I created simple glass casings that you could put candles inside.

I went to visit Linc. A strange, yellow smoke was rising from his workshop chimney. I tried the door, but it was locked, so I knocked on it.

Ten knocks later, he answered. He was wearing an apron covered by red, yellow, and blue stains.

“Hey, buddy. What can I do for ya?”

I told Linc what I needed, and he reckoned he could do something.

“I can’t make candles that burn forever,” he said. “You’d need artificery for that. But I could make a kind of wax that burns slower but also burns brighter. I reckon I’d have to use poppy of the fell, and maybe some crushed Babbacorns.”

Later that day he delivered a box full of candles to me.

“There ya go. I call ‘em Everbright candles.”

“Thanks.”

I gave him two silvers for the candles. He tried telling me no but I reminded him that potioneering was gonna become a business. In real life, a few of my friends and one of my cousins had started their own businesses. They always tried giving me stuff for free but the way I saw it, I needed to support them by buying things from them. It was the same with Linc. Plus, Hilly, Linc, and I had already agreed we’d put at least 50% of our game earnings back into the hamlet coffers, so it all came back to me in a way.

After setting the Everbright candles in their glass fixings attached to the cedar posts, the limestone pathways of Blade’s Rest glowed orange even in the fading light. At night, the glow would be even more pronounced and turn our little hamlet into an oasis of light in an otherwise dark sea of grass.

I had done all of this, purely for ascetics, so I wasn’t expecting the notification that appeared.

Hamlet perk gained: [Minor] Haven

The lights of your dwellings are a sight for strangers’ eyes in the passing of the night. During nightfall, travelers seeking respite from their labors will be drawn to your little slice of the world.

Linc and Hilly got the same notifications I did. Hilly was pleased with it, though Linc didn’t answer on teamchat for a while because he was so wrapped up in creating some kind of potion. When he did, he said that Sheesh had a list of place perks on its website, and maybe we should choose a perk to aim for.

Linc: Seems like a hamlet can only have one perk active. When we upgrade to village we’ll be able to use two at once, and when we reach settlement level we can have three, and so on.

Hilly: I’ll check out the perk list and see what sounds cool.

Creating Linc’s potioneering workshop and the series of limestone pathways hadn’t ranked up my stonemasonry, but it had given me enough general EXP to level up to 5.

This gave me 5 attribute points to spend, one new skill slot, and something else.

You have unlocked 1 class slot.

- you currently do not have enough skills to form a class.

I had created classes a bunch of times in my previous BaS playthroughs, and I knew how to do it. You just needed skills that related to each other. The class was kinda like the trunk of a tree, and the skills were branches coming off it.

My improvisation, carpentry, and stonemasonry were clearly related. My language skill was not. That meant I needed to learn two more crafting-type skills, and with 1 skill slot available, I needed to level up again before I could do that.

Before assigning my attribute points, I opened a browser and accessed Sheesh, where I perused all the different classes that could be formed.

There were all kinds of things such as Artificer Tanner, Arcane Fletcher, Fire Carpenter. That one seemed a strange combination, given how unwise it was to introduce fire to wood.

The one that I reckoned I needed was way at the top of the list – Architect Builder.

Architect Builder

The architect builder class can both plan and construct structures of vastly differing features and complexity. Coupling strong intelligence for top-down planning with great agility for the smaller tasks involved in construction, the Architect-Builder is a great choice for anyone hoping to build a settlement.

As well as this brief overview, the Sheesh guide also told me what I needed to earn the class. An architect-builder needed five skills that could be used in the building of structures. There was a lot of flexibility in which skills those could be, however one of them had to be the architect skill. I was gonna need to make another trip to Westfell.

That night, the three of us met in the Blade and Grunder. The fire was burning bright and warm as always, and lounging in front of it was a German shepherd dog named Tearer. Hercule had found him wandering the fields near Blade’s Rest, and he’d adopted him as the pub mascot.

The tavern was fairly busy tonight. The three of us took our places in the snug near the hearth, which Hercule always reserved for us. Over in the corner near Big George, with his specials sign and clay tip jar, were a group of archers traveling home after coming second in a competitive tournament in Dustpost.

They had come fifth the year before, so finishing second was a cause for celebration. And boy were they in the mood to celebrate. They’d already bought more beer than Hercule usually sold in a week, and they were only just getting started.

Hercule had made a trip to Westfell to buy pub board games a week earlier, but he’d also bought a dartboard. Right now, the archers were playing darts for a copper per round, drinking copiously in the meantime.

A few tables away from them were a quiet family who was enjoying a serving of Hercule’s special of the day – chorizo, potato, and haddock one-pot stew. The father had a big mug of ale, the mother was drinking wine, and the little girl and boy had to settle for dandelion cordial. Tearer the dog, spotting a potential weakness in his midst, targeted the children and concentrated his best begging efforts on them. It wasn’t long until he won, and the little boy slipped him a sliver of haddock.

The father, seeing this, said, “Don’t do that, Bertie. The dog might not be allowed to eat certain things.”

Hercule heard him, and he gave a dismissive wave. “That hairy beast’ll eat anything. Don’t you worry about it.” Then, with a greedy glint in his eye, said, “Why don’t ya buy a plate of spare haddock off me, and your kids can teach Tearer some tricks?”

I laughed at this. I had never seen anyone who was so on the lookout for ways to make more coin. I guess that was a good sign in a tavern manager. At the same time, though, Hercule was also obsessed with quality, and he’d gladly pay for things out of his own wages if they made the Blade and Grunder better. Frugal about one thing, free and easy with the other. I wondered if I could learn from him and loosen up a little.

The archers kept Hercule busy, asking for drinks and tavern snacks such as deviled eggs and pickled herring and little pork pies with brine on the top. By the time he managed to attend to our table, he was sweating.

“Sorry about that, folks,” Hercule said. “Wasn’t expecting such a crowd.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Linc.

“I oughta take on a serving boy or girl. This place is growing bigger than I expected.”

“That’s a sign of good managing,” I said.

Hercule grinned. “Thanks. Anyway. What can I get for ya? If ya want a tip – the archers aren’t gonna be happy with snacks for long. Drinking gives a fella an appetite, and I reckon they’re gonna keep me busy in the kitchen soon. Order some hot food while ya can.”

“Tell you what,” said Hilly. “I’ll have the chorizo and haddock stew. While you’re cooking it, I’ll go behind the bar for a while.”

“You’re a darling. And you boys?”

“I’ll take the beef and horseradish sandwich,” said Linc.

I glanced at the regular menu, which Hercule had placed up high on the wall above the bar where everyone could see it. “I’ll have the rarebit, please. Glad to see you upgraded that from a one-off special to a regular.”

Hercule shrugged. “Who’d a thought that folks would love a bit of rarebit. Okay, then. I’ll get cookin.”

“Know what? I’ll help Hilly behind the bar,” I said. “Thin the crowd a little.”

When our food was ready, we took our seats back on the table near the hearth. Linc got up and threw another log on the fire, but couldn’t leave until he paid Tearer’s ‘stroke me on the head’ tax. Soon, the beast rolled onto its back, tail wagging.

We ate our dinner and drank a beer or two. A couple of hours later Hercule had fed all the archers, and they were entering a food and beer coma, their competitive dart match abandoned. They were sitting around a long table, some of them dozing, others rubbing their bellies while picking morsels off their plates.

“Alright,” I said. “I’m gonna log off. Usual time in the morning?”

Hilly glanced at Linc.

There was something sly in that look. I was sure of it.

“What’s going on guys?” I said.

Linc nodded at Hilly. “You go first.”

Hilly took from her inventory a full fur armor set comprised of shoulder bracers, a chest piece, gauntlets, and boots. They were made from leather bases, with a nice deep brown fur covering. The stitching wasn’t perfect like you’d see in shops in Westfell, but it was impressive nonetheless. The outfit looked like the kind you’d expect to see a hunter wearing deep in grizzly territory in some lonesome woodland.

Hunter’s Furs [Complete Set]

Hunter’s furs offer defensive protection, as well as warmth and comfort and stealth in certain terrains. More lightweight than standard leather armor. A full set confers an extra bonus to defense.

“I figured that you’re gonna be doing all the building around here, so you won’t be leveling your strength much,” said Hilly. “A set of standard leathers would probably slow you down, so this is a compromise. Gives you a better defense but it also helps you move around quickly and without being seen.”

“Thanks. These look great.”

“Ah, well. Not really. But my skill should improve soon enough.”

I equipped the furs straight away, dragging them from my inventory to my equipped character screen. The set appeared over my clothes instantly. I expected them to feel heavy but they weren’t at all, and they even felt comfortable.

“Thanks a bunch, Hilly.”

Hilly gave a dismissive wave. “Just a little thing to say thanks for the workshop. Linc, you’re up.”

Linc took from his inventory two glass vials that looked like wine decanters. They had dark brown corks stopping them, and the liquid inside was a sort of oil black with little specks floating within it.

“So. See these little specks?” said Linc. “That’s granite, asphalt, limestone, oak, cedar, and a bunch of other materials broken and then crushed up. The liquid is eighty percent water, but the other twenty percent is a liquid experience solution.”

He passed them to me.

[Minor] Instacraft Potion x2

When consumed, allows the user to instantly create their next crafting project. Suitable for projects up to one-room structures.

“Sorry it’s only rated minor,” said Linc. “My potioneering isn’t good enough for anything better yet. According to Sheesh, there are different levels of potioneering workshops. The one you made for me is level 1, and more sophisticated workshops let me create better potions.”

“Minor schminor. Fuggedaboudit,” I said, not quite sure why I’d lapsed into Goodfellas-style gangster speak. “This is great stuff, it’ll help us level much faster. How many of these can you make?”

Linc scratched his chin. He had a beard now, a dark brown one that was halfway between groomed and wild. Facial hair didn’t just grow in BaS, which is how I knew he’d gone to visit a barber in Westfell. In the game, barbers didn’t just cut hair – they could add it too. My dad, who’d started balding when he was thirty one, would have loved that service.

“It’s a tricky one,” he said. “I know it’s a minor potion, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple. See, stuff like healing and mana potions are everywhere in BaS. They’re a staple of the game. It’s really easy to find Greenhill petals and fae stool. The little things are shitting everywhere, it seems like. So I can make lots of potions like that.”

“And the instacraft potion?”

“That’s trickier, like I said. I need lots of charred baarorb hide, and they ain’t easy to get.”

“The hell’s a baarorb?” said Hilly.

“Just a little beaver kind of thing. But they’ve got massive claws and they’re mean as hell.”

“Hmm. Maybe I could hunt some for ya.”

“Awesome.”

I looked at my new armor and my potions, and I felt a swell of gratitude. “Thanks a bunch, guys. Lemme get you both a beer.”

“Won’t say no to that,” said Linc.

Hilly lifted her hand in the air. “Hercule! Another round of beers for the founders of Blade’s Rest!”

Chapter 19

We all logged off from BaS after that. I took Baxter to the park and then cooked him a steak as a treat. For myself, I ordered takeout from a Korean place on Hearthside West. Sticky ribs and fried chicken in a sweet-soy glaze, as well as japchae, which was a noodle dish with tons of sesame oil, soy sauce, and seasoned beef.

That night I got into my pajamas and went to my bedroom and turned on the tv. There was a game on, so I watched that while Baxter curled up on the end of the bed and snoozed. Pretty soon he was snoring louder than the TV.

The next morning, I made a cafetiere full of a new Colombian coffee I’d bought to try out, and I took a steaming cup to my desk. There was an email waiting for me from Sasha Watts over at BaS headquarters. She was just checking in to see how I was doing.

I typed a quick reply back telling her the progress we’d made. She replied back soon after saying that the name of our tavern was ridiculous, and I told her that I agreed.

When I logged back into BaS, my goal for the play session was to earn two more building-related skills so I could get the Architect-Builder class. This meant that one of the two classes had to be 'architect'.

I went to the Blade and Grunder, where Hercule was in the kitchen cooking a batch of lamb stew with red wine gravy and dumplings. Through the open door I could see him stirring a big clay cauldron using a wooden spoon. The smell was so good it was almost entrancing. Hearing me enter, he came out into the bar area to meet me.

“Well, mornin’ to ya, fella. The usual?”

“If ya don’t mind,” I said.

Hercule clicked his fingers and pointed his index finger at me. “You got it.”

I ate a breakfast of fried bacon and sausages, with two poached eggs and a handful of mushrooms cooked in oil. It tasted frigging great. It was way too unhealthy a breakfast to eat every day in real life, of course, but if I couldn’t eat bad stuff in BaS without worrying about it, then where could I?

The breakfast served little purpose except for it tasting great, since you didn’t need to eat in BaS. Still, it boosted my mood and by the time I left the Blade and Grunder and stepped outside, I was in great spirits.

It was a good day. The morning air was brisker than a naked run from the shower to the towel cupboard, and smoke was rising from Gorgal’s forge. Over at the stables at the back of the Blade and Grunder, a family of four who’d stayed the night in the tavern were getting their mules ready to pull their carriage.

I left Blade’s Rest and was about to head to the traveler road directed toward Westfell, when I saw a strange-looking carriage heading my way.

The carriage itself was normal, being of wooden construction with giant wheels and a space for a driver on the front and a storage area at the back. It was the driver and the animal doing the pulling that was the strange part of it.

The driver was a man-sized slug creature with slimy hands attached to slimy arms, and in these hands he clutched leather reins that were strapped to an elephant. But this was no ordinary elephant – it was much skinnier than its real counterparts, and it was the size of a horse. Even though it was on the small side, it had a huge snakelike trunk and two bleached tusks on either side of it.

Every so often the slug, who was wearing a tanned brown coat, flipped peanuts to it, which the elephant caught with its trunk. The elephant seemed happy with its tail swishing as it walked. Though I reckoned that was more about swatting flies than showing pleasure. Still, it seemed cheerful enough.

When the strange driver and beast got closer, I saw that there were dozens of huge burlap sacks on the back of the carriage. The bags were waxed to protect them from rain, and the contents inside bulged in straight lines. They were books, I reckoned. They had to be.

The slug pulled his carriage to a stop at the entryway to Blade’s Rest. His name tag was yellow, which indicated that he was an NPC, if I hadn’t already have guessed. His name was Marvin and his elephant was called Charles.

He took his hat off his head and doffed it to me.

“Well, good day and good mornin’, my two legged friend!” he said. “It’s a little too dry of a mornin’ for my liking, but that’s okay. I reckon the sky’s promising a nice bit of rain later.”

I nodded at him. “Morning.”

Marvin peered at the hamlet sign. Unlike real slugs he had proper eyes, which were sitting atop the tentacles on his head.

“Blay’s Rest,” he said. “That the name of this place?”

“Blade’s Rest.”

“Sorry. My eyesight isn’t too good. Charles here acts as my eyes when we’re on the road, he can see things from miles away, can’t you, Charles?”

Charles happily swished his trunk upward and patted Marvin on the head with it. The slug fed him a peanut.

“What can I help you with?” I said.

“Well,” said Marvin. “I’m what you might call a traveling bookseller, on account of me traveling around, selling books. You a reader, son?”

“Yup.”

“Then how about I show you my wares?”

Thinking how inconvenient it was to travel to Westfell to see Bryp the satyr – and why I kept going back to his shop in the first place- I reckoned it wouldn’t do any harm to see what Marvin had for sale.

“Sounds good.”

At this, a menu system appeared in the center of my screen. It was a list of Marvin’s inventory, showing hundreds and hundreds of books. I was able to sort them by type, price, and effect.

When I filtered by ‘crafting’ he had four books for sale.

Plane and Simple by Hugh F. Yellerstone

[Effect: Learn carpentry skill]

Screwing Around by M.S. George and B. George

[Effect: Learn improvisation skill]

Cracking Flags: A guide to the world of Limestone and Basalt by Anonymous

[Effect: Learn stonemasonry]

The last book was titled Tinkering Around, and it was a beginner’s guide to tinkering. Tinkering was a more developed form of improvisation, allowing the creation of items involving mechanics and explosive powders, among other things. It also allowed the crafter to repair items, as well as modify or improve stuff. The tinkering book was listed at 12 gold, which was steep for a skilltome.

“I might take the tinkering book, but we’ve gotta talk about the price.”

Marvin regarded me with the look of a slug who’d had people haggling with him all of his life. “How so?”

“I mean, it’s clearly second-hand. The condition is shoddy. And is that a stain on page 12? Hmm. I’ll give you 7 gold for it.”

There was a moment of pause as Marvin thought about my offer, which in effect meant that the game was performing a charisma check on me. My language skill, coupled with my intelligence, boosted my under-the-hood charisma check chances.

I said nothing, waiting for him to speak.

“Done!” he said.

I handed him the gold and took the book.

“Say. Is it worth me adding Blay’s Rest…Blade’s Rest… to my regular haunts? I tend to make a circuit of Gobbler’s Creek, sometimes going as far as Waterfall Mass if business ain’t good around here.”

“We’re only going to get bigger, so yeah, I’d say so.”

“Splendid as a muddy puddle on a drizzly day! Say. I’ll make this easy for ya. I’ll leave a waxed, artificed notepad here by your sign. Write down any books you need. The notepad is artificed, so it’ll alert me to what you need no matter where I am. I’ll procure ‘em and deliver ‘em to you when I swing by.”

“Got it.” I jerked my thumb behind me. “There’s a tavern over there if you guys want to rest and get something to eat. I’m sure Hanz and Franz will love to get to take care of an elephant.”

Marvin shook his head violently, making his tentacles sway. “No. Oh no. I don’t like taverns, no sir. Cooks use way too much salt in their food in places like that. All I need is a nice spot of rain and a hunk of lettuce, and I’m happy.”

I took one last look at Marvin’s wares before he left. There was a cookery book for people with cookery ranked apprentice and above. I bought it for Hercule, hoping it would expand his range of recipes.

When Marvin and his elephant carried on down the gently sloping travelers’ road and headed toward Black Salt Lake, I took my new book to my hut and I opened it to the first page.

To learn the tinkering skill, I had to either repair, take apart, or modify an item, with various examples given.

I chose to modify a crafting hammer, but I was going to need some supplies in order to do some tinkering.

I went to Westfell, where I visited a tinker supply store owned by a gnome called Dilbert who wore an apron smeared with oil, and who was so entranced by a giant metal gear that he was fiddling with that he didn’t hear me come in.

“Hello?”

Dilbert looked up. He was wearing a set of tinker goggles with gears on the side that let him change lenses at will. I didn’t know what each lens did and why he needed different ones.

“Yup?” said Dilbert.

“I just need some tinkering supplies.”

“Let’s get on with it, then. I’m behind on my orders.”

From Dilbert I bought a set of springs and a small tinker’s motion mechanism, which was a strange metal box with stuff inside that rattled when I shook it.

I didn’t like to craft stuff in the street, but there was no point heading all the way back to Blade’s Rest. Besides, this was BaS. People did all kinds of weird stuff. Even now, I glanced across the street to the row of shops where the tinker’s place was, and a dwarf player named BubbaGumpGimp was pan-frying some trout, right there in front of everyone.

As BaS towns went, Westfell wasn’t the busiest in terms of players. This was because of its lack of quests and its low-level shops. There was a military garrison at the northern borders of the town which offered combat-focused players a few noob starter missions, and there were plenty of shops selling basic equipment. But it was the sort of town that players would quickly outgrow, and once they reached level 10 and above, they would most likely head for the tougher parts of BaS.

The ones who stuck around tended to be crafters like me, as well as folks who weren’t even here for leveling, but just wanted to enjoy the full immersion. They wanted to walk through a sunny town where the nights didn’t last long and were, in fact, just as pleasant as the day. They wanted to eat in taverns where the food tasted better than a microwave pizza. Instead of watching TV in their apartments, they wanted to spend the evening in the Westfell merchant’s plaza, where they could sip mulled wine and watch a fire eater put on a show.

Ducking into an alleyway so I had some space, I took out a crafting hammer that I’d made earlier using my crafting station.

Using the springs and the tinker’s motion mechanism, or the TMM, I created my first tinkered item.

Item modified: Crafting Hammer.

Modification: [Poor] Slow Self-Hammering Crafting Hammer

My modifications increased the value of the crafting hammer from 2 gold to 8. That was a decent change but it didn’t cover the cost of the springs and the TMM. Oh well.

More impressed were its effects. A small, blue bar appeared above the hammer. When I positioned the hammer above something and told it to activate, the hammer rose up and down of its own accord. As the hammer was rated [poor] and I didn’t yet have the tinkering skill, my tinkering work wasn’t all that great. The hammer would probably stop working after a few repetitions.

Anyway. It was a step closer to getting the skill.

I took the hammer apart, set each part of it in my inventory, then waited a second. Next, I reassembled the self-hammering craft hammer again. Doing this counted as creating a new object, which took me even closer toward earning the skill.

After doing this several times, I received a notification.

You have learned a skill – tinkering.

Rank: Apprentice

The craft of repairing or modifying items, often with the use of mechanics and gears. Advanced tinkers can use explosive powder.

Do you wish to accept [Apprentice] tinkering?

When I accepted, tinkering was added to my growing skill list. With 4 crafting-related skills, all I needed was to learn the architect skill and then I could get the architect-builder class. Just one problem, though – right now I didn’t have any skill slots left. I needed to level up.

Just then, my teamchat pinged.

Linc: Guys…need help!

Chapter 20

After receiving Linc’s summons, Hilly and I met up at the edge of Crookshack woods. I was wearing my set of furs, and I had an[average] spear to protect myself with. The base was made from solid oak, and the tip was a durable piece of flint with a sharp tip.

I also had two health potions that Linc had brewed for me, and I kept these in loops on my belt. This allowed me to use them quickly. Rather than having to drink them, I just pressed my finger against the potion for 5 seconds and I would consume it.

While I looked in no way imposing, Hilly was a warrior dressed for war. She was wearing a complex leather chestpiece that was tanned dark in some places, light in others. It was held together not with stitching but a series of metal rivets. The shoulder pads were layered with 5 separate pieces of leather, which protected her while allowing for a good range of movement.

“Did you learn the armorer skill?” I asked her.

“Nope,” she said. “But there’s an armorer in Westfell who gives you a discount if you bring him enough leather. Anyway. What’s the deal with Linc?”

“No idea. I only know what he sent us in teamchat.”

Linc had sent us a message on teamchat asking for help, then refused to elaborate. Checking the minimap, I saw that the orange dot representing him was deep in the Crookshack woods, and it didn’t seem to be changing location.

“He’s pinned down by something,” said Hilly. “Must be.”

The afternoon was quickly fading. BaS was slowly moving into its Endless Black season, which was an overdramatic name for a season that basically meant it went dark a little earlier in the evening. The woods looked foreboding in the growing darkness, and there was a strange, almost expectant silence. Even knowing I couldn’t feel pain and that dying just meant a debuff and respawning in my hut, it was still a strange feeling to peer into the black of the trees and imagine that I saw shadows lurking there, waiting for us.

This was the flip side of the full immersion coin, I guessed. Warm stews and cool beers were great, but full immersion also meant that the scary things felt real, too.

Holding a hatchet in her hand, Hilly stole off into the brush. It was a good weapon choice because the woodland critters were low-level, and the hatched offered a quicker strike rate.

I followed her with my spear in hand, and we cut a weaving route deeper into the twilight maze of bushes and great elms, drawing ever nearer to Linc’s unmoving dot. Occasionally Hilly paused and stayed still in a half-crouch.

Hilly hadn’t leveled her intelligence as much as me, but she’d at least put a point or two into it. When I increased my intelligence, it reacted with my crafting skills and produced more craft-based effects. Whereas Hilly’s skills were combat, hunting, and tanning focused, so she received under-the-hood boosts to her perception.

This helped us now because we were able to avoid a grizzly bear that she spotted in the distance, and we took a more cautious route towards Linc instead.

But Hilly wasn’t infallible.

Twice we were set on by forest wolves that caught us unaware, pouncing from our flanks in blurs of fur and fangs. As low-level creatures, their intelligence was poor and they were drawn into attacking Hilly, the stronger player. She and her armor took the brunt of their damage, while I stabbed the crap out of them with my spear. Though I had to admit Hilly did most of the killing, I got a decent share in the exp.

Quicker than I could even see, Hilly took their pelts and put them in her inventory bag to work on later, in her workshop.

Threading ever closer to the woodland’s beating heart where animals lived and spread secrets that lay untold to the hearts of men…or some similar mystical-sounding stuff…we finally found Linc.

He was in an open clearing. On one side of the clearing was him, with his foot caught in a huge trap made from sharpened wooden stakes. In the middle of the clearing was a strange-looking plant with fruit that looked like it was made from crystal.

On the other side, was a giant bastard of a bear. This thing was huge. So big that it made other grizzlies look like stuffed toys. Its claws looked like they could tear the lid off a tank – if tanks have lids, I don’t know, I’m not an expert – and its teeth looked like they could bite through the hull of a cruise ship.

Right now, the bear wasn’t moving, though its fur-covered muscles quivered with tension.

“Guys…” said Linc.

“You okay?”

“Err. Well, present situation excluded, yes.”

“How the hell did this happen?” I said.

“So remember the plant I was looking for? The Banshee Polkweed? Well, there it is. Turns out that it’s got a protector.”

The Banshee Polkweed was the flower that only spawned in one place in the woods at any one time, and once it was picked, it respawned elsewhere in the woods. In the middle of a huge expanse of woodland, I could see why this little thing would be tough to find.

“If you’re caught in a trap, you can just choose an insta-death and respawn back in the hamlet,” said Hilly.

Linc shook his head, speaking in a whisper. “No. Because once you see the Polkweed, if you leave it, then it respawns somewhere else. It’s taken me bloody ages to find it.”

“I don’t think the bear over there is just going to let me pluck the flower, get you out of that trap, and be on our way.”

“No. You gotta kill it,” said Linc.

“Is this really worth it?” I asked.

“If we were facing real death…no. Of course not. But in BaS? Sure. Honestly, the potions that I can make with this thing…”

“This better be worth it,” said Hilly.

She took a testing step toward Linc. When she did, the giant bear reared up on its legs. Standing at its full height, the thing looked even more terrifying. She took a step back, and the bear settled back onto all fours.

“Okay. It’s programmed with a field of aggro, which means it’ll only attack if we get too close.”

“Do you think you can kill it?” I said.

“That thing? It’s elite. So I dunno.”

“Elite? I can’t see that.”

“My hunting skill tells me that kinda thing. Hang on.”

Hilly was quiet for a moment. She must have been checking out the great bear on Blade and Sheesh. The website had an entire section devoted to in-game monsters.

“Okay. The short answer is no, I can’t kill it. This thing is an elite guardian.”

“Damn it,” I said.

I knew about guardians. Spread throughout BaS were rare caves, rare treasure chests, rare ruins. They were usually filled with low-level mobs that you had to hack your way through, culminating in an elite guardian battle at the end. The level of guardian depended on what it was guarding – some of the battles in the higher level dungeons lasted for hours in real time.

“Sorry, Linc,” I said. “Hilly can’t kill it, and she’s the toughest of the three of us.”

“Aw, come on. Just take a death for me. Is that too much to ask? I’ll buy ya dinner in the Blade and Grunder.”

“Dinner and breakfast.”

“Done.”

“Dinner, breakfast, and lunch,” I said. “Since I’m the one likely to die first.”

“Fine, you asses! Done.”

Hilly whispered to me. I didn’t know why she was whispering, since the bear worked on a field of aggro.

“I’m the one who can damage it,” she said. “So I’ll need you to be bear bait. Get its attention. Keep close enough to it to get it focused on you, but keep out of the killing field for as long as you can. I’ll hack away and see if I can bring it down before you die.”

I crossed my arms, thinking about something.

“Josh?” she said.

“I don’t like that idea. Even in BaS, I still don’t like to die. Maybe I have a better plan.”

In my character menu, I accessed my stonemasonry skill. As an apprentice, there were just a few different templates of buildings that I could make, each of them with one floor. I selected a basic limestone, one-roomed structure.

Dragging limestone from my inventory, I piled it onto the silhouette of the building in my menu until a green notification told me: Building ready to begin. Please select a location.

On my display, a see-through outline of the building appeared. I could direct it wherever I wanted in the woods, moving and rotating it across the clearing at will. All I had to do was place it, and construction would begin.

I took from my inventory the Instacraft potion that Linc had given me as a thank you gift. I held my finger against the vial to consume it without having to drink the horrible-looking, oily liquid.

Effect gained: Instacraft

Your next crafting project will be instantly created.

Duration: 600 seconds

Working quickly, I overlaid my see-through structure right where the bear was standing and ordered it to begin building. A timer appeared as usual, but it rotated all the way around in an instant.

Now, where the bear had been standing, there was a windowless, doorless limestone building with a pissed bear inside. The beast started bellowing from within, and the stone walls seemed to shake as it pounded them in a fury.

A red bar above the building began to slowly empty.

“Not bad!” said Hilly.

“Let’s move our asses. Potion or not, I’m only an apprentice. It won’t take it long to break through it.”

Hilly went to free Linc from the trap, while I plucked the Banshee flower from the ground and put it into my inventory. The bear was rampaging inside its limestone prison, stomping from one end to the other while roaring with an impossible fury and smashing its great paws against the walls. This made the structure shake and its damage bar plummet even further.

Hilly got Linc’s leg free, and the trap he’d got caught in clanged shut. Hilly put it in her inventory. Linc got to his feet.

“The flower,” he said.

“I got it,” I said.

“Can you give it to-”

The east wall of my hastily-constructed building smashed into pieces, and from it emerged an angry, giant bear covered in white dust. It opened its great jaws and snarled threats in bear-tongue, spit dripping from teeth sharp enough to make mince out of bone.

“Shit!”

The three of us took off into the woodland. Linc, with his increased agility, was the fastest, followed by Hilly.

Although I’d increased my agility a little, I was keenly aware that it wasn’t enough. I was also aware that right now, at least, having a higher intelligence attribute was no comfort when I had got a ridiculously fast and strong bear closing in on me.

I tried my best to speed up, running at the kind of full pelt that had no regard for balance or obstructions in my path. Twice, I almost stumbled and only just carried on.

And the bear kept coming, never missing a step.

As it got nearer to me, almost to within swiping distance, I was reminded of a saying.

When you’re being chased by a bear, you don’t need to outrun the bear. You just gotta outrun the slowest person in your group.

Unfortunately, that was me.

A great weight slammed into me, knocking me to the ground. There was no question of getting up or fighting back, even though I tried. I caught the bear with an uppercut that would have hurt, had it been a man. As it was, the creature barely felt it.

With two great swipes of its paws, the bear ended my existence.

Chapter 21

Luckily, my existence continued one minute later, when I respawned inside the familiar and comforting confines of my hut in Blade’s Rest. I was lying on my bed, wearing furs that were stained red.

The stains would gradually disappear over time, but for now they served as a grim reminder that builders shouldn’t go stealing a giant bear’s favorite flower.

Death debuff gained:

You have lost 5 inventory items.

My stomach dropped. This wasn’t such an unusual debuff to get when you died in BaS. Sometimes you lost gold, sometimes exp, but plenty of times you lost some or even all of your inventory.

If I had lost the Banshee Polkweed, Linc was gonna be so disappointed.

I checked my inventory to see what was missing.

Let’s see.

I’ve definitely lost some of my limestone….my self-hammering hammer…some granite, some lumber.

I couldn’t see it.

The Polkweed was gone!

I checked again, hoping my eyes were deceiving me.

And then I saw it, a tiny little flower in my inventory, sandwiched between 10 lumps of coal and 50 slate bricks.

I breathed out in relief and shut my eyes for a moment, only to hear rapid knocks on my hut door.

“Come in.”

This command allowed Linc and Hilly to enter my hut. Linc stood over my bed. “Well? Do you have it?”

“That ain’t a comforting way to speak to a guy who just got killed.”

“C’mon, Josh. Tell me that ya got it….”

I made a grim face. “Linc, buddy. I’m sorry to say…that there’s a giant bear who’s gonna be pissed, because I have his Banshee Polkweed!”

I gave the flower to Linc, who immediately exited my hut and sprinted away, no doubt heading to his potioneering workshop.

Hilly remained in my hut. “Fancy a beer?” she said.

“You bet.”

I sprang out of bed with the speed and agility that definitely didn’t belong to a guy who’d just been killed by a bear. I stretched my arms above my head until I felt a satisfying crack, then straightened my fur armor and headed out of my hut.

By the time we got to the Blade and Grunder, word had somehow already spread through the hamlet about what had happened. When we entered the tavern, a grizzly bear came rushing at us.

Hilly drew her sword.

I stood there, shaking my head.

The bear stopped running. From behind it came the sound of a grown man laughing like a kid.

“That’d be scarier if the bear wasn’t carrying a tip jar and a specials menu,” I said.

Hercule carried Big George back over to the bar, laughing to himself all the way.

Gorgal, Frenrita, Hanz, and Franz were sitting at our usual table, near the snug. Seeing us, Gorgal stood up.

“We get up,” he said.

I shook my head. “No, don’t worry about it. We’ll sit over here. A chair’s a chair.”

Gorgal nodded. “Metal armor. I make for you. No more death by bear.”

“I don’t reckon I can use metal armor. But thanks.”

“I’ll take some if the offer’s there,” said Hilly.

“I will make.”

Hilly bought us two tankards of a new ale that Hercule was trialing, called The Imp’s Demise. It was a cherry ale. The idea of mixing fruit and beer seemed weird to me, but man, did it taste good.

I ordered us two bowls of crab ravioli, a special that was available today thanks to Atticus and Argyle expanding their operation to a beach way south, which was full of soft-shell crabs that you could collect by the bucketful.

“Let me make a fool of you while we wait,” said Hilly.

She headed to the dartboard on the wall, kept in place by string tied around a nail. The dartboard was quite new, but it was already scored with thousands of dots thanks to the archers and their drunken competition.

Hilly won one game and started crowing about it, so I whipped her ass by winning the next three. At which point Hercule arrived with two bowls of ravioli served in a basil and garlic sauce. It was so good I ate one bowl full and then ordered another.

“Hungry?” said Hilly.

“Always.”

“Yep. Stupid question.”

Linc showed no sign that he was going to leave his workshop any time soon, and Hilly told me she was heading northeast and would be gone for maybe three or four game days.

“There’s some kind of canyon near a town called Forlorn Hope. They got buffalo running around and when you tan their hides, the leather’s crazy durable.”

This left me to my own devices, but that was good because I had lots to do.

Heading toward the travelers’ road, I stopped by the hamlet sign, where Marvin the bookselling slug had left his request list. Already there were a few requests written on it. Hanz and Franz had asked for a book on astronomy, while Frenrita had requested a book called ‘The Blacksmith’s Secret – A Saucy Adventure.’

Later on, in Westfell, I crossed through merchant’s square. There were lots of strange looking stalls set out around the square, and they were selling all different kinds of foods such as spicy sausage, beef rolls, pork knuckle, and fermented cabbage. I bought a spicy sausage and a portion of fermented cabbage from a stall manned by an old gentleman with rosy red cheeks.

“You eat now, or take for later?”

“I’ll take it wrapped up, please.”

My travels took me across streets where the taverns were open and they had set tables and chairs outside, and these were all occupied by folks wearing strange pairs of trousers that reached up to their chests and were held in place by multicolored straps that looped around their shoulders. Every table was taken up by giant tankards of beer. One tavern, the Ape and Mongoose, had a sign outside that said ‘Happy Bavarnis Festival.’

Checking my world map, Bavarnis was a region in the far west of BaS, in a valley surrounded on all sides by towering lava mountains, the home of volcanoes that had been dormant for centuries.

Seeing how busy and cheerful Westfell was – except for some of the town’s inhabitants who resented the influx of beer drinkers – made me think that maybe Blade’s Rest should start having festivals. It’d be a good way to draw the kinds of footfall we’d need for higher levels.

The spicy sausage and fermented cabbage was still warm in its wax wrapping when I reached Scribbler’s Row. I headed to the end, where I reached Forked Tongue Books.

I couldn’t say why I kept coming back here. Bryp was an asshole and it wasn’t as if he gave me a discount. I guess I just found him amusing, and it was a change from some of the dryer merchants in BaS.

Reaching his shop, I ever-so-gently opened the door. I did it inch by inch, as slowly and quietly as possible.

When the gap was wide enough for me to fit through, I dashed in, startling Bryp’s weird demon bird.

“Ha-ha! Got ya!” I said, pointing.

Its feathers stood on end, revealing scaly skin beneath. It was shaking.

“Geez. Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare ya. I just wanted to give you a taste of your own-”

The bird suddenly shrieked at me. It was so loud that I jumped. Its feathers flattened and it made a sound that I was sure was laughter.

Bryp entered the shop front and was about to pounce on the counter, when he saw me.

“Ah. It’s you. What can I do for you?”

I put the sausage parcel on the counter and unwrapped the wax packing.

“First, I don’t know why I’m being nice to ya. Maybe I’m in a good mood, which is strange considering the day I had yesterday. But anyway. I don’t know what satyrs eat, but you never seem to leave this place so I reckon you never get to enjoy all the festivals and stuff that happen in town.”

Bryp stared at the sausage and cabbage, which was giving off a divine aroma.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“No. It isn’t that. It’s just…nobody ever brought food to me before.”

“Yeah, well, maybe that’s because you’re an ass. Oh. I forgot. They gave me a wooden fork.”

I handed the fork to Bryp, forgetting that he had hooves for hands. Shaking his head, he tossed the fork aside and went into the back of his shop, returning soon after with an implement that was fork-like except it had a grip that fit around his hoof, like a cutlass handle.

Wielding a knife that was similarly handled, he cut up the sausage and gave some to his demon bird, and then he ate the rest with a speed that suggested a tremendous appetite had been brewing.

When he was done, he burped and set down his knife and fork. “Ah, tasty it was, yes indeed. Thank you, friend, for I…for me…you did feed.”

His voice trailed off, as his eyes closed sleepily.

I pressed the bell on his counter, and the tinging sound woke him up. “Hey! You fixed the bell!” I said, delighted.

“Well, yes. I supposed there are some concessions I must make for customers.”

“Anyway. No problem about the sausage. Now, I need another skilltome.”

“My. You are busy, aren’t you?”

“I’m building a town. Well, more of a hamlet right now. So yeah, I guess I am.”

“Which skill tome do you need?”

“Something for learning architecture.”

“Hmm. A tricky subject.”

In one leap of his goat legs, Bryp cleared the counter and landed in the shop front. He browsed his own shelves, muttering to himself, “Architecture…architecture…”

Finding nothing, he once again leaped over his counter and jigged his way into the back area of his shop, where he was gone for five minutes.

I looked up at the demon bird, which seemed to be regarding me with slightly less hostility than usual. “Enjoy the sausage?” I said.

It gave a happy-sounding squawk, if that was even a thing.

When Bryp returned, he was shaking his head. “Sorry, human. I pride myself on my stock, but this alludes me. Alludes me it does, for I’m afraid that I must say, I, unfortunately, don’t stock, your architecture book.”

“That didn’t quite…”

“It was a half rhyme,” said Bryp, curtly.

“Not really. Is there anywhere else I can try?”

Bryp suggested that I visit the royal college of builders in the town of Blaswegis, which was 500 miles away. There was no royal family in this region of BaS so the alleged wasn’t actually royally affiliated, he said. He reckoned that the pompous asses just thought that having ‘royal’ in the name of the college sounded better.

“That’s a way away, even on a carriage,” I said. “Are you sure there’s nobody else who can help?”

“If you’re referring to the other booksellers, then all I’ll say is this: they’re bloody arseholes. Don’t buy from them.”

“Surprise surprise, you don’t like your competitors.”

“Oh, I do. There’s a rather nice slug who travels the land selling tomes. Delightful fellow he is. But the other shops of scribblers row are pompous, stick up their arses…”

“Ok. So let’s say I won’t try the other shops. There’s gotta be someone who can help.”

“You could try the crafter’s guild,” said Bryp. “They have an assembly hall on Cottage Pass, near the church with the overhang that looks like it will fall off any blasted minute. But again. If you go to a guild, then on your head be it.”

“You don’t like guilds?” I said.

Bryp spat. Then he realized he’d spat on his own counter, so he wiped it with a cloth. “The booksellers have a little club, and surprise surprise they do not let the satyr join it. Humans are contemptible, Josh. They aren’t all like you. At least you’re only half contemptible…”

Leaving Bryp to his grumblings, I headed toward the crafter’s guild, getting lost on a maze-like street called Witching Alley, where many of the town’s pickpockets operated. I had to double back on myself and then take a longer route past a park dedicated in memory of the orcs who died in a battle near Westfell fifty years ago, finally arriving at the guild maybe an hour before sunset.

The crafter’s guild was a strange building, towering four or five levels above the shops on either side of it. It was narrow in structure and looked like a pile of Jenga bricks, with each floor sticking out at odd angles as though they were made separately and then haphazardly placed on top of each other.

I would have expected a building like this to fall down, yet there was an oak tree outside it. An old oak tree, thirty feet tall. Beside it was a plaque that said that the tree was planted when the guild was opened. I guessed it had stood for this long, so maybe it would stay stable for just a little bit longer.

Heading inside, I emerged into a foyer with a marble floor. Dotted around the room and pushed up against the walls were various stone statues. There was a giant hammer, a chisel, a wood planer. Three archways led deeper into the guild – north, east, and west. There was nobody in sight.

I was unsure where to go until I noticed that each archway bore a symbol etched into the highest point of the arch lintel. The one I needed showed an etching of some kind of blueprint.

Following this archway took me into a tunnel lit by oil lanterns fixed to the wall. It ran true for a while before turning right and then bringing me to a great hall.

This place was huge. Way bigger than should have been optically possible, given how narrow the building was from the outside.

One third of the hall was taken up by an open-plan tavern called the Grand Design, where a burly-looking barmaid served beer and food to folks lounging by tables.

Another was given up to great, long oak desks, on which were spread white and blue rolls of paper, covered tip to toe in pencil markings. Most looked incomprehensible to me, but glancing at one paper, I was sure I was looking at the design of a windmill.

Finally, the furthest third of the hall was given to merchants who’d set up various stalls. There were five merchants in total. Some of them sold blank prints to design things on. Two merchants both sold pencils, triangles, protractors, and the like, and they seemed to regard each other with hostility and were constantly yelling over each other.

The merchant that I reckoned I needed was a woman who was spaced away from the rest. She was sitting behind a wooden stall, yet she didn’t have any wares on show.

As I moved toward her, a man suddenly appeared in front of me. He was wearing a smart, stark blue suit.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, his nose pinching with every word. “Are you a fellow of the guild?”

“Nope.”

“Then you must pay two coppers to enter.”

I got my money out.

He arched an eyebrow at me, tilting his head slightly upwards as though he found it repugnant to face me straight on. “Are you a craftsman, may I ask?”

“What the hell’s it got to do with you?”

“I have to ask, as only craftsman may enter. If you would be so kind, sir.”

He held out his palm. Feeling annoyed and wanting to get this over with, I placed two coppers in his palm. He didn’t do anything with them.

“Ahem. I need to analyze your skills, sir. If you would be so kind as to touch my palm with your index finger.”

I shrugged. “You’re the one who’s gonna look stupid, buddy.”

The employee, gatekeeper, whatever he was, shut his eyes for a moment, before saying, “Very well.”

With no further barriers to my entry, I crossed the hall of the architect’s guild and sought out the merchant lady, who was sitting alone. She had grey hair that fell to her shoulders, and though her complexion was pale, her right hand was a deep purple and her fist was clenched.

She acknowledged me with a slight nod of her head.

“Carpentry, improvisation, stonemasonry and…tinkering. Hmm. An apprentice in most. Skilled in just one.”

“Hit the nail on the head,” I said. “How’d you do that?”

“It is written in the stars.”

Written in your code, more like, I thought. “I need some training. Can you offer it?”

“Perhaps, if the stars shine gold enough.”

A menu system opened for me, covering her from my vision.

[Jaqueline-Mae Sharp, fellow of the Westminster Architectural College.]

Services:

Architecture – Beginner’s instruction

Custom building design [Prices dependent upon size]

Instant skill training in architecture cost 275 gold. In my personal stash, I had 78 gold, 10 silver, and a few coppers. I had more than that in my inventory, but the rest of it was earmarked for hamlet stuff. It wasn’t really my property.

This was a steep price to pay for a skill which would cost me maybe 5 bucks and some time if I used a skilltome. Trouble was, there didn’t seem to be any architecture skill books in Westfell, and the nearest town from here was a fair distance.

Ah. But maybe there was something I could do.

“Thanks, but I’ll leave it,” I said.

I headed back to Blade’s Rest, where the familiar sight of our growing little hamlet with the limestone paving and the soft light glowing from my makeshift lamps gave me a warm feeling.

At the hamlet sign, I made an entry in Marvin’s request book saying that I wanted some kind of guide to learning architecture. And then, I headed to my hut to do some nice, quiet crafting.

That was when I heard the sound of some kind of wild beasts tearing across the field toward me.

Chapter 22

My first thought was bears. Or rather, bear – no plural. I thought that maybe the bear from the woods had tracked me or something, and was so pissed that I’d stolen its banshee flower that it wanted to kill me for a second time.

Instead, I was surprised to see eight grunders heading in my direction. My visit to their village in the south made it seem like they did their best to appear more sophisticated than the rats and other critters that they resembled, but not today. These grunders were sprinting on all fours.

I brought my spear out from my inventory and then headed into the hamlet, ready to round everyone up and warn them that we were under attack. It occurred to me that maybe we needed a giant bell for that very purpose.

But the grunders didn’t attack.

They didn’t even follow me.

Instead, they gathered at the hamlet sign and didn’t make any move to enter our settlement. Among them, I saw was Oak, the grunder chief. He looked especially old today, and he was wearing a fur coat with four holes for his paws and legs to fit into. One of the grunders picked up Marvin’s request book and sniffed it, but Oak slapped it out of his hand.

He said something, and thanks to my language skill, I was able to pick out a smattering of his words.

“Put…it…not…yours…”

“Sorry chief,” replied the rebuked grunder.

Hilly joined me, sword raised. She was wearing just her trousers and shirt and tanning apron, no battle gear. At least, not at first. One rummage in her inventory later, and she was dressed as though she was heading into battle.

“I’ll take the old one,” she said. “Whatever happens, let me have him. Smug old git.”

“What’s going on?”

Linc was wearing a checkered shirt – green and brown. Around his waist was a leather belt that Hilly had made for him. It had twelve loops, each big enough to fit a potion vial. When he put a vial into a loop he just needed to tug something on the belt’s other side, and the loop tightened and held the vial in place. Like with all potions, merely holding his index finger against the glass would let him quickly consume it.

What the potions were, I had no idea. I recognized the blood-red liquid of a healing potion. But the others were strange. Some were gloopy like glue. Others looked to me like vomit. They were definitely potions that you’d quick-consume rather than actually drinking them.

“These guys followed me here, I think,” I said. “Either that or they were heading here and it was just a coincidence that we met at the same time.”

“Aren’t those the fellas who we made a trade deal with?”

“Sure are,” said Hilly. “They’re holding some of Josh’s shovels.”

“Crude shovels. Not something to go to a fight with.”

“Still. I knew something bad would come from arming a bunch of overgrown rats.”

“I didn’t arm them. If a gardener walked toward you holding a shovel, would you shout for a cop and tell ‘em that the guy was armed?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Just stay here a second,” I said.

I started toward the grunders. Hilly caught hold of my arm. “Hold on. If anyone’s gonna kill ‘em, it might as well be me. I get skill points for my attacks.”

“They’re not here for a fight, Look at them. They aren’t moving.”

“Maybe they can’t get any closer. This is a player-owned hamlet,” said Linc.

Hilly shook her head. “Nope. A place only gets critter protection as a perk when it’s a village. If the grunders wanted to attack, they could. Assuming they figure out that they can climb over the gate.”

“We can get attacked while we’re in here? Then why aren’t the fences higher and stuff! You’re the head of defense!”

“Sure, and that’s why I’m always hunting close by. I’ve spent so much time exploring Gobbler’s Creek I could tell you every animal that’s in it. I even named some of ‘em. For instance, there’s a wild boar called Percy who roams near a pond northeast. In any case, the only mobs around here likely to come near the hamlet are the wolves and the grunders. We decided to make a trade deal with the grunders, so that leaves wolves. And they won’t attack a place that’s populated. Hence, I deemed us secure.”

I approached the grunders, some of whom shrank back in my presence, while others quivered with barely contained hostility. Oak regarded me with old, ratty eyes that contained more than a spark of wisdom.

Hilly and Linc followed me close behind.

“Hello, human,” said Oak. “May…enter?”

“Maybe. If…tell…why…here,” I replied.

“Huh?” said Hilly. “What am I missing here? You can understand them?”

I explained to Hilly that I had earned the language skill, and that I had done it by using a human-grunder skill tome.

I hadn’t been entirely sure how it worked until now, but the way I figured it was this. Whatever the grunders said, the game rendered it as unintelligible rat language to Hilly and Linc. To me, however, it played it in English. Then, when I spoke to the grunders, the game allowed them to understand me. But when Linc or Hilly spoke to them, the grunders had no clue what they were saying.

“We…in trouble,” said Oak. “Deep, deep trouble.”

I repeated this to Hilly and Linc.

“Well we don’t want it brought to our doorstep. Scram,” said Hilly. “Josh. Translate what I just said. Tell ‘em to scram.”

“Lady questions our motivations for helping in your troubles,” I said.

Oak took a pouch from his robe. It was a coin purse, and it was bulging with coins. With his rat claws, Oak opened it and took out a gold coin.

“We have more of gold toys you covet. But must help.”

Soon after, we gathered in the Blade and Grunder. When I led the grunders through the hamlet, they had been scared of the sounds coming from Gorgal’s forge. One of the braver, younger grunders spotted Hanz and Franz on the roof of their hut, messing with their telescope. Despite the urging of an older grunder, it climbed up and joined the boys.

Franz was scared and backed away to the edge of the roof, whereas Hanz smiled brightly at the rat-like creature. “Would you like to look through the telescope?” he asked.

At the Blade and Grunder, the creatures stared at the tavern sign hanging above the door. Hercule had commissioned it from a sign maker in Westfell, but since I was paying him, I had made a few suggestions. As such, the sign depicted three brave, strong-looking human adventurers standing proud and holding blades, and near them were grunders prowling through the grass.

The grunders pointed at the sign and spoke too excitedly for my apprentice language skill to follow.

“Yes,” said Oak. “I see it. Be quiet.”

The tavern was empty tonight. With the Endless Dark season in full sway, the NPCs were programmed to travel less on the country roads when it was night, since critter activity was increased after dark in any case, and it doubly increased in Endless Dark nights.

This meant that Hercule found himself at a loose end, and when we entered the tavern we caught him filling a few minutes of it by dressing Big George, his stuffed bear, in some rough combat leathers that Hilly had given to him. While learning tanning and basic armory, she had made lots of practice armor that was mostly worthless, and she donated it to everyone she could.

“Why not just throw it away?” Linc had asked her.

“I should…but knowing I made it, I can’t bring myself to.”

Gorgal, Frenrita, Hanz, and Franz entered the tavern shortly after, meaning that quite a crowd of us were there for the grunders’ summit and to hear their woes. Hercule dragged two tables together in the center of the room so that we could all sit close to each other.

Ever the host, the barman took our drinks orders, and even offered to get a stew going.

“I got plenty of beef leftover, thanks to Hilly. I can make us a nice beef and ale stew. How’s that sound, huh?”

Never ones to turn down Hercule’s cooking, we agreed that it sounded great. Gorgal asked for some pickled herring, and Hercule said he didn’t have any. When a look of disappointment crossed the blacksmith’s face, Hercule laughed and said he was only kidding.

“Some pickled herring, comin’ right up,” he said, clicking his fingers then pointing at Gorgal. Then he said to Hanz and Franz, “You boys got a taste for herring like your old man here?”

Franz looked at Hanz, waiting for his brother to speak.

Hanz said, “Ugh. No.”

“Disgusting,” Franz then agreed.

“Okay. So beef stew for you guys, herring for Gorgal here. Nothing for you, Frenrita? You sure? Okay then. Now. That just leaves you fellas.” He asked me to ask the grunders if they were hungry, and if so, what they liked to eat.

Gorgal was about to speak, but I asked the grunders first, and the blacksmith gave me an impressed smile. From then on, however, I asked Gorgal to take over translation duties in the interest of speed.

“We eat only that which grows in the ground or on trees,” said Oak. “We thank you, man of the tavern, but we had communal feast but four hours ago.”

Hercule nodded. “Right you are, then.”

“So,” I said, facing Oak, “Let’s talk turkey.”

Gorgal translated this literally.

“Turkey? Why would we do that?”

“Never mind. Just tell me what’s going on.”

Hilly nudged Linc. “Weird as hell, seeing Gorgal and Josh talk to them, ain’t it?”

“It’s fascinating.”

“May you please be quiet,” said Oak.

Gorgal translated this for Hilly and Linc. Hilly glared at the old grunder, but said nothing.

Oak proceeded to tell me what had gotten the grunders so worked up that they had journeyed all the way here to a human settlement to ask for help.

It turned out that an emissary had recently arrived at their settlement. It was a representative from the grunder settlement east some ways, led by an individual named Redfang.

“Redfang is taller than other grunders,” said Oak. “And he is stronger. On his back he wears the toughened hide of a cow, shaped and treated for battle.”

Gorgal translated what Oak said as he said it. Hearing this, Hilly said, “Leather armor?”

I repeated it to Oak.

“Yes, leather armor – armor of the dead cow. The protection of the heifer. The toughened battlements of the bovine.”

“Okay, we get it,” I said.

“Red fang has one great, red tooth that can crush through a shield of metal, and it is said that with it, he has murdered menfolk and grunders alike.”

“Okay, okay. So this Redfang. What did he want?”

Redfang, Oak told us, had heard about Oak’s dealings with what he called ‘the loathsome two-legged apes.’ Oak assured me that this wasn’t a poetic embellishment on his part, and that Redfang’s emissary had really said it.

At any rate, Redfang was disgusted that Oak would give a golden shower – evidently, he didn’t know the word for coins either – to the humans, and he’d decided that Oak’s settlement was giving grunders a bad reputation.

As such, he’d decided to obliterate them.

“He’d really do that? Grunder versus grunder?” I said.

Gorgal said, “Grunders eat own babies sometimes. When litter is big and times are bleak.”

Hilly, after digesting everything Gorgal and I translated for her, said, “So, you want us to take care of this Redfang dude for ya. You want us to kill him, slaughter his best warriors, burn down his settlement, and then bury his ashes in a pit where no sunlight ever reaches. That’s what I’m hearing from you, Oak. Tell me if I’m wrong. Oh! Food’s here!”

Hercule arrived bearing metal trays stacked with bowls of stew. He dished these out, before disappearing and then returning with yet another tray. This one had hunks of bread for dipping in the stew, as well as a generous bowl of pickled herring. Franz saw the fish dish placed in front of his father and eyed it hungrily until he saw that Hanz was pinching his nose and then he did the same.

Seeing the feast laid in front of us, the grunders eyed the fare with hungry eyes. Without a word, Hercule went to the kitchen, returning soon after with bowls full of chopped wild onions, shredded lettuce, carrots, and roasted broccoli.

He laid this in front of Oak and his people. The grunders waited for Oak to take the first bite and then, most likely through custom, began to eat as well.

“Redfang has delivered his ultimatum,” said Oak, who had a stray piece of lettuce stuck to his snout.

“An ultimatum implies a choice. What’s he demanding of you?” said Hilly.

“Nothing. He says he will destroy us.”

“That’s not an ultimatum, then. It’s a threat. Or maybe a statement of fact.”

“I don’t think he really cares about the semantics,” I said.

The tavern door opened and in scurried a grunder. Young, with a slinky body that was covered in mud. It moved quickly and with little sound, and its thigh and shoulder muscles tensed with surprising knots of muscle.

“Ah. Scout Darric. You have returned,” said Oak.

Darric the grunder scout nodded. He had an unusually serious look on his face when compared with the other grunders who, even when threatened by their destruction, retained an almost cute look.

The scout composed himself.

“Redfang approaches, Chief Oak. He and forty of his best warriors are coming from the south.”

Chapter 23

According to Darric, we had six hours before Redfang arrived. In terms of real minutes, that wasn’t long at all. I was already planning things in my head.

Hilly put her wooden spoon in her almost empty stew bowl, and she pushed the bowl away and got to her feet. “Alright. I’m the head of defense in this clown house, so it looks like it’s down to me to sort this out. Here’s what we’re gonna do.”

We were quiet to a man and to a grunder, waiting to hear what she had to say.

She pointed at Oak.

“You and your other rats need to get the hell out of Blade’s Rest.”

With that, she sat back down, grabbed her bowl, and resumed eating.

Linc stared at her.

“What?” she said.

“That’s it?”

She shrugged. “Let the mean collection of computer code kill the meek computer code. We’re here to build a town, not get involved in the battle of fake rats.”

“Aw, come on. I mean, I know what you’re saying. But look at ’em! Look at their little faces! Josh?”

“I gotta say. I agree with Hilly, actually. I don’t see why we’d get involved in this even for a pouch of gold.”

It was then that a notification appeared in front of me.

Special Event – Protect Oak

Your settlement is soon to be under attack from a hostile grunder who seeks to kill one of his kind. Protect Chief Oak from harm, and earn a reward.

Rewards:

- 2500 gold

- 3x hamlet chests

“Maaaaaybe I spoke too soon,” said Hilly. “I mean, Linc’s right. Look at Oak and his little friends. Look at how cute they are.”

I stood up. “I don’t think we can hold out against so many grunders, but it’s worth a try with so much gold at stake. I wonder why we got this as an event, though?”

“Dynamic content,” said Linc. “The devs are trying to build the player-creation side of things. Random events will be a big part of that because it keeps things fresh. Add in the fact that our actions caused a complex chain of events and…well. yeah. This system frigging rules.”

“And all this, coming from a guy who never played BaS until recently.”

“What can I say? When I’m into something, I’m into it. I can read, ya know.”

I stood up. “If Redfang’s coming to us, then we better get this place defensible,” I said. “We ain’t got long.”

Hilly nodded. “Hey. Old rat man. Can you send a few of your vermin out to scout for us?”

Translating this for Hilly, I said something that I hoped sounded like, “Esteemed Chief Oak, your quickest grunders may be best deployed along our perimeter.”

Oak nodded. “It will be done.”

Just then, a notification told me that my language skill had already jumped up in rank to novice, which increased my comprehension and my ability to digest language books. I dismissed the notification.

“So the rats are scouting for us. Good. Everyone else,” said Hilly, “Follow me.”

“Where to?” said Linc.

“My workshop.”

Gorgal and Frenrita went to fetch their metal armor and their hammers. They also had a spare sword they could give to Hercule but he declined, disappearing into the back room of the tavern.

He came out holding a long, wooden box.

“Don’t worry yourselves, folks. I don’t need your weapons. I got my own.”

In one smooth motion he flipped the latch and opened the box, to reveal a gleaming blade resting on a bed of quilted fabric inside it. The blade was old, I could see that much even though it was clean and shiny. It was just an aura that it gave off, a scent of age and legend.

He dropped the box, kicked its underside with his boot and sent the sword spiraling in the air. He twisted on the spot and then caught it, ending his rotating by facing us and holding the sword with the point stretched outwards.

“Man, he’s cool,” said Hilly.

Hercule mimicked sword blows in the air. “This old thing’s just a relic from my old days.”

Hanz and Franz took Patti the mule and Yulf, Hercule’s horse, into their hut after badgering their parents until they secured permission. They were worried that if the animals were left outside they might get hurt, or they might get spooked and run away. Gorgal suggested hobbling them, but the boys couldn’t stand the idea of the beasts standing there, scared and unable to move, while a battle raged around them.

Linc, meanwhile, sprinted off toward his own workshop where he slammed the door. Soon enough, a strange yellow smoke rose from the chimney.

I headed outside of the Blade and Grunder, where I appraised our hamlet’s defense. I wasn’t at all happy with what I saw but then, I never expected to be invaded by forty grunders.

I took my last Instacraft potion from my inventory and pressed my finger against the glass until I absorbed its contents. When a notification told me that the potion was in effect, I got to work.

Four game hours until Redfang gets here. Not long at all.

First, I examined my inventory to see what materials I had to work with. I had steadily crafted through much of my lumber supply, and Linc was so wrapped up in potioneering that he hadn’t gathered more or purchased any more supplies from the loggers. I guessed that was my fault – I should have let him know I was running low.

Similarly, I had been planning to make another trip to Glenda Gildfree at the quarry to put in another order for stone. I could hardly do that now, so I was going to have to improvise.

Using the very last of our timber, I created a new fence wall surrounding our existing fence, with a small gap between them. A man would struggle to walk through it, and he’d have to go sidewise if he persevered with the attempt. On the tops of both fences I placed nails with the sharp ends pointed upwards and slightly slanted, making them difficult to climb over without giving yourself the BaS version of stigmata.

My hope was that even if the grunders got over the first fence, this would leave them in between it and my original fence. Faced with the choice of trying to climb yet another nail-studded fence or just following the narrow walkway and hoping to find an easier way into the hamlet, that would delay them enough for us to launch an attack.

I headed to Linc’s workshop, where I had to knock on the door seven times before he answered. He was wearing a leather apron and some goggles, as well as thick gloves that reached to his elbows. His apron was covered by all kinds of stains and even though it was made from thick leather, parts of it had dissolved away. I reckoned Linc was going to burn through lots of aprons as long as he was a potioneer.

“Yup?” he said, his face glistening with sweat.

I explained to him about the two fences and the narrow passageway.

“What I’m hoping is that you can make something we can throw on ‘em while they’re trapped in the walkway between fences. We’ll call it – ‘The Passageway of Death.’”

“Nice name. You need something fiery?”

“Well, I wasn’t thinking that we’d just douse ‘em with water.”

Linc clicked his fingers and pointed at me. “Leave it to me.”

“Did you get that gesture from Hercule?”

He shrugged. “He’s a cool guy.”

The game hours ticked by way too quickly, and even with instacrafting it didn’t leave me much time to do anything else.

As Oak’s scouts fled back into the hamlet, Hilly arrived adorned in her finest leather armor, holding a new sword that she’d bought in Westfell and saved for a momentous occasion like this. It was a longsword by name, and it was easy to see why. It was almost as tall as she was, yet she held it with a relaxed grip like it was nothing. With my low strength attribute, my stance with the sword would have been much less refined.

Following her were Oak and his grunders. Some of them had leather armor of their own, such as I’d already seen them wear. Of the ones who had arrived here without leathers, Hill had quickly cobbled something together in her workshop. They looked ridiculous, but at least they had a little more protection. Oak and some of his more elite warriors – if you could call them that – wore steel claw caps that were well-worn and reaching the end of their durability, judging by the many dents on them.

The hamlet became a cauldron of noise as we made our last preparations. Hercule thought twice about leaving Yulf in a hut and instead led him out, saddled him, and then climbed onto him. He galloped in a circumference around the village, swinging his sword in practice arcs to loosen up. Hilly took charge of the grunders, placing them in strategic points around the hamlet's inner fence.

By far the most imposing of us were Gorgal and Frenrita. They were huge in any case, but their great metal chest pieces and blackened steel head visors that hid their cheery faces added another aspect of menacing power to their statures.

“Josh. Hilly. Come here a sec.”

Linc was standing in the doorway of his workshop. The two of us followed him inside, where the air smelled like a mix of sulfur and something vinegary.

“Don’t worry about the fumes,” said Linc. “They’re toxic as hell, but they’re mostly vented, and this ain’t real life anyhow.”

A wooden workbench was pushed up against the wall. While the workbench that I’d created for myself was perfunctory and well-finished, with perfectly sanded edges and a pleasant dark hue– hell, the thing could have come from Ikea – Linc had asked for something different. He wanted his workbench to look rough. Uneven. Like it had been made in the forest by some woodland-dwelling society.

“I hate stuff that looks too well-made,” he told me.

On top of his bench were four dozen vials, each of them filled with liquids of various colors and consistency.

“They’re mostly rated minor to mediocre,” Linc explained. “Best I could do under the circumstances. I’m close to getting the skilled rank in potioneering, though.”

Hilly approached the workbench. “Looks like you’ve done plenty enough to me. What’re we looking at?”

“None of us use mana, so you’ll notice there are no mana potions. Exhaustion might be a factor if the fight goes on long enough, so grab a couple of the yellow potions each. Red ones are for healing, obviously, and I made plenty. Take six each. Hilly, maybe you wanna take more, considering how much we need you.”

Hilly saluted. “You got it.”

I didn’t know whether to be offended that I evidently wasn’t as needed in the fight as Hilly, or glad that my risk of death and a debuff was less. I decided to adopt an attitude of gratitude, as became the new outlook on life that I was trying really, really hard to foster.

Linc carried on. “The black potions are something called Betty’s Whistle. They’ll explode and catch fire when the glass is broken with enough force. You can either physically hold ‘em and then throw them at folks, or tap the glass with two fingers, and a cursor will appear.”

“Can’t wait to try ‘em,” said Hilly.

“This looks great. You’ve been busy,” I told Linc.

He nodded. “Can’t say I’m happy that I’m making stuff that explodes. But still. Let’s get this over with and we can go back to nice, calm, Blade’s Rest.”

“Josh. Catch.”

Holly tossed something at me. It looked like a leathery snakeskin. When I caught it, I saw that it was a quick-access potion belt with twenty access slots, ten on each side.

I took the two healing potions off my current belt and put it in my inventory to sell the next time I met a merchant. After fastening on my new belt, I filled one side with healing and exhaustion potions, and the other with Betty’s Whistle.

“Just one last thing,” said Linc.

From his inventory he took out three more potion vials that he held with the reverence of a steward holding the king’s crown and being scared to drop it.

“One for you, Hilly. And Josh, here’s one for you.”

We each took a potion from him. Hilly pulled the cork off her vial. From inside the glass came a wailing scream.

She dropped the glass. Linc quickly made a kneeling motion and caught it, then breathed out in relief.

“Yeah. Don’t do that.”

“This is the banshee Polkweed thingy, isn’t it?” I said.

“The flower we almost got killed by a bear to get?”

“Almost?”

“You know what I mean.”

Linc nodded. “One-of-a-kind flowers. Now that I picked it from the Crookshack woods, it’ll respawn in a different region in BaS, and it’ll move around the region every day. It’s more elusive than your front door keys when you’re in a rush to get out.”

“What does it do?” asked Hilly.

“Easy. Drink the potion and then focus on an enemy. It’ll mark them as ‘wailed’, which is where the banshee name comes from. When they’re marked, they suffer a 50% reduction in defense.”

“You got more of this plant?” I asked.

“Yeah, I didn’t use all of it. Maybe half. I’m saving the rest for when my potioneering improves and I can make more potions using less of the plant.”

“It’s about time Redfang got here,” said Hilly. “Let’s go exterminate some rats.”

Outside the workshop, Oak’s grunders were spread throughout the hamlet. The smaller, sleeker ones were clinging onto parts of the fence and staring out into the fields of Gobbler’s Creek beyond. The bigger, stronger grunders surrounded Oak.

I headed over to Gorgal and Frenrita. “Are you sure you wanna fight?”

Gorgal pounded his chest, making the metal ring. “Blade’s Rest is home.”

He was wearing an unusual amount of jewelry to complement his metal chestpiece. When he saw me staring at them, he pointed at each piece in turn. First, the metal bracer on his left wrist, and then he went on to explain each item in turn.

“Bracer to increase strength. Bracer to make less tired. Ring of strength, another ring of strength. Ring of replenish health.”

“Guy’s got more bling than Mr. T,” said Hilly.

From across the hamlet came a grunder, scampering over the grassy areas and then onto the limestone path. Its pace, coupled with the change in terrain, made it slip, but it righted itself and headed to Oak where it said something so quickly that I couldn’t translate it.

Oak approached me. “Redfang is here.”

“Alright everyone,” I said. “Good luck.”

“That’s all ya got, Maximus Decimus Meridius? Good luck?” said Hilly.

I shrugged and cupped my hand around my mouth. “What we do in life, echoes in eternity!”

Grunders scattered to their planned positions, while Hilly, Linc, and I headed to a northeast part of the inner fence, where Redfang’s approach had been spotted.

I took out three wooden benches from my inventory and placed them by the fence. These were simple wooden steps that let us see over the fence when we stood on them.

“Holy shit that’s a lot of grunders,” said Hilly.

Climbing onto my bench, I peered over the inner fence to see a horde of rat-like warriors tearing across the plains. They were dressed for war, wearing not just grunder-customized leathers, but also metal shoulder pads with spikes jutting from them.

Redfang led the way. Bigger and stronger than the rest, he was also the fastest and he was at the head of the column and quickly gaining ground on the hamlet.

“Time for some pest control,” said Hilly.

The grunders reached the outer fence. Some of them started climbing it, only to put their paws through the nails I’d placed on top. One grunder managed to place his paws on a part of the fence that was free from nails, only to receive a sword blow to the head from Hilly. He lost his grip, falling down onto his friends and knocking them off the fence.

Now that I knew which part of the fence they were focusing on, I used my crafting menu.

This structure belonged to me, so I was free to add or modify it as I wished. While adding stuff took time – if I didn’t have an Instacraft effect – removing things was instantaneous.

I removed a panel of the fence, giving the grunders access to the walkway between the outer and inner fences.

It was so narrow that they could only scurry into it one at a time.

Hilly placed her fingers against one of her black exploding potions.

“Steady…” I said.

“They’re getting in.”

“We want them to.”

We did nothing, letting the grunders file into the small passageway. When the last of them were inside, I used my improvisation skill to replace the section of the fence that I’d dismantled, trapping them in an inner looped hallway that had no way in or out.

The grunders soon realized their predicament. Some of them began to scrabble over the walls, while others pushed and shoved against each other, searching for a way out.

“Okay,” I said.

I tapped two fingers against a black potion on my belt. A crosshair appeared on my display, and I aimed it at the grunders and threw it.

The vial smashed against the fence and the liquid inside exploded in a fiery rain that fell on their backs. To the left and right of me came more shattering glass.

Soon, the inner passageway was a spectacle of burning grunders. Some of them scurried over the walls, not caring about the nails on top. All told, fifteen of them made it over the fence and into Blade’s Rest, where they rolled on the grass until the fire on them extinguished.

“Here we go!” shouted a voice.

Hercule galloped forward on his horse. In the corner of his mouth was a rolled cigarette, and in his right hand he held his sword, twisting the hilt in his hand as he neared the grunders.

With great, thudding steps, Gorgal and Frenrita stomped to meet the invaders. Four grunders set on them, and with one swing of his hammer, Gorgal sent them sailing up high, arcing way over the fences and landing somewhere in the fields beyond with a crunch of shattering bones.

Oak gave a command and his protectors separated, each heading for one of Redfang’s warriors.

Redfang himself charged toward Oak.

As imposing as Redfang was, his leather armor was almost burned away, and only his metal shoulder bracers were intact. His gait was less sure than before, and his back right paw was badly burned.

As he neared Oak, I used stonemasonry and a last piece of stone to craft a step right in front of him. Knowing that there would be a few seconds of delay as it constructed, I aimed it a little further ahead of him.

His momentum carried him into it, and he tripped and tumbled, rolling along the grass and coming to a stop on his back, not far from Oak.

Hilly stepped in front of him and delivered a downwards swing with her sword, cleaving the warrior grunder in two. The split pieces of him landed in the grass.

Seeing their leader lying in pieces, many of the remaining grunders fled. Of those who didn’t, Gorgal, Hercule, and Frenrita warily took care of them, stabbing and hammering until the air around Blade’s Rest was silent once again.

Chapter 24

The morning sun was only just rising when the battle was over. The air of Blade’s Rest was calm yet it carried with it a faint hint of sadness, an effect helped or perhaps caused by the scent of grunder blood in the air.

Or maybe I was just being dramatic.

Despite his fighting efforts Hercule had already opened the tavern, though not to customers. Instead, he made a vat of coffee and he started cooking bacon and eggs for the humans, and he prepared salad for the weary grunders. He brought out mug after mug of coffee and made sure everyone had a cup, keeping up morale by slapping folks on the back and telling them what a good job they’d done. He even found time to write ‘Victory for Blade’s Rest’ on the chalkboard outside the tavern.

I helped Oak and his people separate their fallen from those of Redfang’s people.

“Don’t worry about their bodies,” I told him. “We’ll get rid of those.”

“No,” said Oak.

“Huh?”

“They will be taken to our village, for consumption.”

“You’re gonna eat them?” I said.

He nodded.

“But you guys are vegetarians.”

“It is our tradition. The victors eat the fallen, that they may digest their strength and spirit. Always has it been.”

The grunders began dragging Redfang’s peoples’ corpses out of Blade’s Rest and into the pastures beyond. For hours they did this, never stopping for a break. Soon enough, they eventually had forty of them piled outside. Flies were already gathering around the charred and mutilated bodies.

I wondered how lifelong vegetarians could break their diet not out of necessity, but for some weird ritual. And worse, how they broke their diet to eat the flesh of their own. Finally, I wondered how they were going to carry so many bodies all the way south.

An answer came soon enough when a carriage arrived. It was driven by a man who wore a white shirt with yellowed patches under his armpits. He had long hair that he swept back to cover an expanding bald patch. The carriage was of simple construction, with just a space on the back to store things. His horses looked just a little bit underfed. Either that or they were overworked.

Curious, I headed toward them, when I heard the man speak.

“Sorry I’m late.”

Oak climbed onto the driver’s seat, sitting next to him. “It is of no matter.”

I was surprised that a man who appeared to be a simple carriage driver could speak grunder. But then I noticed Hilly standing beside me.

“Did you hear that? Little bastard spoke in English!”

The grunders loaded Redfang and his people’s corpses onto the carriage, stacking their limp, furry bodies five high. The driver faced straight forward, as though willing himself not to look at what was going on.

“Ready?” he said.

Oak nodded. “Onward.”

“Two stops, ain’t it?”

“My village first,” Oak said. “And then my new village.”

The driver flicked his reins and the horses snorted. Slowly the carriage wheels began to turn, flattening the grass. The grunders ran alongside and behind it, a pack of them keeping up with their old master who appeared to be having a casual conversation with the driver.

“Did I just hear that?” said Hilly.

“I’d be asking the same thing of myself, if you weren’t here as well.”

“What’s going on?” said Linc, approaching us with three mugs of coffee. He gave one each to me and Hilly.

“Stop me if I read the situation wrong,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure Oak can speak English, right? Not only that, but he arranged in advance for a carriage driver to arrive here this morning so he could help transport a bunch of corpses back to their village.”

“You’re dead-on so far,” said Hilly.

“As well as that, he said they’re going to their ‘new village’ after they go home. That means Redfang’s, I take it.”

“What are you saying?” said Linc.

“That old fucking rat isn’t what he makes out to be. He lured Redfang here, I reckon, so that we’d help him kill Redfang and his warriors. And now that Redfang’s village is pretty much defenseless, Oak’s gonna take it for himself.”

Hilly shivered. “Gives me the creeps, conniving like that.”

“The worst thing is that he’s seen the hamlet. He knows everything about it. The layout, our defenses. We better work on that.”

“I’m on it,” said Hilly. “Let’s shore this place up.”

I had leveled up twice in the battle, thanks to receiving an enormous amount of combat EXP. This gave me 13 attribute points to spend – six that I received for level 6, and 7 more for hitting level 7.

I quickly checked the Sheesh skill guide, looking up what it took to learn architecture.

Skill: Architecture

Beginner requirements:

- Intelligence 20+

- 2+ crafting skills

I was surprised to see such requirements just to learn a skill. However, when I checked Carpentry on Sheesh, that too had a minimum agility of 2, and intelligence of 5. I guess I just never knew about the skill requirements for it because I had already met them.

My current intelligence was 11, which meant I had to spend 9 of my attribute points to bring it up to the minimum level for architecture. I did that, which greatly expanded the available items in all my crafting skills. Items were added to improvisation, carpentry, tinkering, and stonemasonry.

I didn’t have time to check them in detail, but a glance revealed more available building outlines, as well as utilities such as oil lamps and stone guard walls and gates with gear and pulley systems.

This left me with 4 points to spend. Agility was moderately useful in some crafting skills because it improved your crafting speed. I was tempted to spend my four points on that.

On the other hand, this battle proved that no matter what, I wasn’t going to escape at least a little bit of fighting in this BaS playthrough. Maybe I should use some points to increase my strength.

It was a dilemma for sure, but I decided to trust in my original plan. I was never going to have a character build that could win fights on brawn alone, so why fritter away valuable points by putting them into strength?

I spent the four remaining attribute points on agility.

I was about to get started on planning my 2.0 version of the Blade’s Rest defenses, when I saw a carriage approaching from the travelers’ road, turning at the crossroads and heading in our direction. It was a familiar carriage. One pulled by a happy-looking elephant.

Heading to the hamlet gates, I was met by Marvin the slug, who pulled Charles the elephant to a stop. Marvin was wearing a finely embroidered waistcoat as well as his signature top hat. He looked to have done well for himself recently, judging by his fancy new clothes.

A strange thought hit me then, and I wondered why I hadn’t wondered it before: why is the slug the one with the high A.I., and the elephant iOS the one pulling the carriage?

Ah well. I’d go crazy trying to explain the eccentricities of BaS.

Marvin took off his hat and held it aloft.

“Good morning sir, good morning to you! It isn’t a mirage tricking your eyes, certainly not! It is I!”

Marvin looked beyond me, at the hamlet where the limestone paving bore the stains from the previous night’s action.

“What in the name of lettuce happened here?” the slug said.

“Long story.”

“Stories are my currency, dear human! Or at least, other people’s stories. And on that note, we have business to conclude, hmm?”

Just then, Franz and Hanz came tearing out of their hut, eager to get their mitts on the astronomy book that they had requested. Behind them came Frenrita, looking exhausted beyond belief but clearly unwilling to miss the chance to collect her steamy romance book.

I quickly paid Marvin and took from him the architecture book that I had ordered. Wasting no time, I went to my hut, where I sat on my bed and opened the book.

On the first page of the skilltome was an explanation of what architecture was, along with a brief overview of some of the most revered architects in BaS, both past and present. There was also an advertisement at the bottom of the page paid for by the lady in the architect’s guild who charged a fortune for training.

Turning over the page, I saw the diagram blueprints of five different types of buildings, ranging from a one-story townhouse to a building so high it was almost like a tower block. To learn the skill, I had to copy each diagram several times until the skill sank into my bones. Or, in other words, until BaS had had enough jerking me around.

I had already bought blank craftprints for when I needed to do some architecture, so I was ready. For the next couple of game hours, I copied the diagrams onto them. Then I copied them some more. In total I must have worked for maybe twelve game hours, repeating them again and again.

Finally, a notification weaved itself into my vision.

You have learned a skill – architecture.

Rank: Apprentice

The planning and construction of buildings and other structures.

Do you wish to accept [Apprentice] architecture?

You bet your left nut I did. I accepted the skill, and immediately it wrote itself into my skill list.

But that wasn’t all.

No sooner had I accepted this fifth skill, than I got the prompt that I’d been looking forward to for a while now.

Class requirements satisfied: Architect-Builder

You have earned 5 [builder] related skills, and can now choose it as a class.

Architect-Builder class rewards:

- Immediate membership in the builder’s guild

- Ability to create custom craftplans from scratch

- Access to the builder’s job board

- Increased relationship with merchants who sell crafting and building supplies

- 50% discount on crafting training

- 25% increase in crafting speed on all crafting-related skills

Unlike with learning skills, I didn’t have a choice of whether I wanted the class or not. The fact that I had collected 5 class-related skills made the choice for me, and my sole available class slot was removed.

I did, however, have the freedom to toggle the class on or off. This would become useful later on when I earned enough class slots and enough skills to have an extra class or two. Though a player could collect as many classes as they wanted if they persevered in learning skills, they could only have one class activated at once.

With my leveling done, I was left with a single notification in the upper-left of my display. I expected it to be about our hamlet leveling up, but it was something else.

Special Event Completed– Protect Oak

You have protected Chief Oak from his enemy Redfang, earning yourself a reward.

Rewards:

- 2500 gold

- 3x hamlet chests

Hilly and Linc joined me in my hut, where we decided to open our hamlet chests together. As the three joint owners of Blade’s Rest, the 2500 gold was split between us, as were the hamlet chests.

“Man, I’m exhausted,” said Hilly.

“Use one of the potions I gave ya.”

“In real life, I mean. I’m gonna do this and then log out.”

“I hear you.”

We each placed our chests on the floor of my hut. Hilly opened hers first, receiving a tanning toolset that included a weird-looking implement for dehairing stuff, as well as an array of knives for fleshing. They came in a fancy roll of leather with lots of hoops on the inside that kept the knives tucked tight.

As well as that, she got a hunting horn that, when blown, actually drew animals toward her general vicinity for 5 minutes. Finally, she received a yew bow that was almost as big as her. It was well finished, with a dappled effect running down the wood so it looked dark in places and light in others. It didn’t, however, come with arrows, which I supposed was the bow and arrow version of ‘batteries not included.’

“You next, buddy,” I said to Linc.

“It’s weird that we do it this way,” said Hilly. “Watching each other open our loot like parents watching their kids. But I kinda like it.”

In Linc’s hamlet reward chest was a forager’s backpack which had 500 spaces. This was the equivalent of getting an iPod, I reckoned – it had more space than he could ever fill.

As well as that, he got a set of potioneering vials and flasks that improved not just the quality of his potions but the rate of his skill rank increases, too. Finally, his last piece of loot was a strange run of glass tubing called a ‘Concentrator and dilutor’, which let him create twice as many potions as before with the same amount of ingredients.

Linc immediately left my hut and raced off to his workshop, leaving Hilly and me laughing.

“Aren’t you gonna wait to see me open mine?” I called out to him.

“Sorry!”

Hilly took a seat on my bed. “Go ahead. Open yours, ya dope.”

Inside my hamlet chest was just one thing:

Item received: Architect’s Glasses

These were a pair of spectacles, brown-rimmed and with glass lenses that didn’t, thankfully, change my vision. What they did do was point out improvements and weaknesses in existing building craftprints, and could be used to do the same on already-constructed buildings and structures. According to Sheesh, they were a semi-rare item.

I resolved to try them out straight away. First, though, with our chests opened, one thing puzzled me.

“The requirement for our hamlet leveling up was that we had 50 people visit Blade’s Rest, and that they stayed for at least four hours, right?” I said. “The Blade and Grunder has been open for a while now. I’d be surprised if we hadn’t satisfied it yet.”

“Lemme check. Nope. Says here we’re sat at 49.”

“We need just one more person to visit, then. Tell you what. I’ll go and find someone on Travelers’ Road and persuade them to come over here for a while.”

I headed out of my hut and crossed through the village. BaS had a ‘cleaning’ effect, where the corpses of dead monsters and players and the stains of battle gradually disappeared over time. It was a pointless drain on resources to keep dead bodies all over the game map, and the place would soon become crowded with them otherwise. As such, Blade’s Rest was already looking a little cleaner, and it wouldn’t be long before all the bloodstains were gone.

This aspect of the game was lost on Hercule, however, who was using a bucket full of muddy water and a broom to scrub the pathway in front of the Blade and Grunder.

As I pushed open the hamlet gates and started toward the travelers’ road, I saw a lone figure walking down it. They were short and squat, and they walked in a sort of hopping way, as though their every step was scored by music that I couldn’t hear.

It didn’t take long for me to make out a familiar bearded face and mischievous eyes, and familiar goat legs that hopped and skipped down the way. As strange as it was to see Bryp away from his bookshop, I was weirdly pleased. I was, however, a little less pleased when he got closer and I saw his Mansour freak bird sitting on his left shoulder. Around his right shoulder he’d slung a cloth burlap sack.

“Oh, jeez,” said Hilly, from behind me. “Not this guy. Linc told me about him. If you need me I’ll be in my workshop.”

Bryp skipped his way to the Blade’s Rest gate, where he paused a moment to read the sign. He smiled at me.

“Here am I, and pleased you are, to see Bryp, who has traveled far!”

“I thought you didn’t like doing the rhyming stuff?” I said.

“Sorry, human. I’m just excited.”

It was true, he did look excited. It was like seeing a different satyr altogether. Gone was the grumpy-faced creature who manned his bookshop counter, always ready with a scowl.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Our last conversation made me think about things, you cheeky human. I haven’t taken a day off in a long time, and what do I have to show for it? Not even an imp’s testicle, that’s what.”

“Imp’s testicle?”

“Nothing is what I mean, human. I could open my shop for all the hours in the day and the night, and people would prefer to shop at my human competitors. So, I thought to myself that I would make a change in my life.”

“Ah. So you’re going traveling?”

Bryp nodded. “I am. Or, I was. My travels are complete because I am at my destination! Now, where’s this tavern you were telling me about?”

I led him through the village. Hanz and Franz were helping scrub blood from the limestone pathways, oblivious that it would soon disappear anyway, while a proud Frenrita watched from her doorway. They hadn’t even been asked to do it. Gorgal, as ever, was in his forge. It didn’t matter that he’d spent the last night fighting grunders – it was daytime, and that meant it was forge time.

In the Blade and Grunder, Hercule was in the kitchen getting started on the day’s special. It was a king prawn linguine, according to the specials menu resting in Big George’s left paw. That meant Hercule must have got a delivery from Atticus ‘N’ Argyle that morning.

“Take a seat,” I told Bryp.

He pranced across the tavern and to the table near the snug, which Hilly, Linc and I usually took. He hopped his ass onto a bench and then scooted along. Peering across the tavern to the regular food menu on the wall, he squinted and then took from his pocket a pair of spectacles. He perched them on the end of his nose and studied the menu.

“Hmm. Let’s see. I’ll have the beef and ale stew. I’ve never tried that. But I haven’t had prawn linguine, either. I don’t even know what a linguine is – is it some kind of special prawn? Ah, but what’s this? Rarebit. Is that like a delicious rabbit? I can’t decide! You know what…I’ll take one of everything.”

Over at the bar, Hercule nodded. “A guy with an appetite. You’ll fit in around here, pal. And to drink?”

“One of everything.”

“One pint of every beer?”

“Yes,” replied Bryp, nodding. “And a glass of every wine, says I, for I am thirsty, I do not lie!”

“Here we go again. I’ll help with the drinks,” I said.

Hercule nodded. “Appreciate it, buddy. Hey, Bryp. I’ll bring ya meals out one by one. That alright?”

“Quite alright.”

Hercule clicked his fingers and pointed at him. “Sit tight, buddy.”

After pouring an army’s worth of beer for Bryp, he paid me in gold coins and then I took a seat in the snug, across from him. He gestured at his collection of different colored beers.

“Take whichever one you want.”

“Thanks.”

As I sipped on a pale ale and Hercule brought dish after dish for the always-hungry satyr, Bryp told me what he was actually doing here. Turned out that he had sold his shop in Westfell, and taken all of his gold from the private vault he rented in the cellars of a Westfell bank named Stepson’s Lenders & Gold Storage. A name, if you asked me, that was a siren call to thieves and rogues.

After that, Bryp had purchased the services of a transport carriage, and he had paid two teenagers to help load all of his books onto it. When they were done, he offered to pay them double if they could beat him in a game of riddles, which they lost. The carriage driver would be on his way right now, Bryp told me.

“And when he arrives, I shall challenge him to a riddle also,” said Bryp. “That reminds me. Tell me something, human. How good is Mr. Hercule at riddles?”

“Don’t even think about it. Pay him fair and square.”

“Ah, you’re no fun.”

“So what’s the deal? You aren’t just going traveling, then?” I said.

He took a big swig of Golden ale and shook his head. “Nope! It’s much better than that. I’m here to do you a favor – I’m going to open the very first bookshop in Blade’s Rest!”

After discussing it with Linc and Hilly, we decided that it might not be such a bad thing to have a bookshop in the hamlet. After all, I had already made many trips to Westfell in order to buy books. It might cause a rift with Marvin, who had added Blade’s Rest to his daily rounds, but that couldn’t be helped.

And so, after Bryp had spent four hours in Blade’s Rest, I got a notification telling me that our hamlet had reached level three.

There was no physical change in terms of its appearance, however, its signal on the local map grew slightly larger. This meant that more people would discover Blade’s Rest, and they would be more likely to come and visit.

Now, we just had to make sure that it was a place worth visiting.

The End

Thank you for reading book one!