Alexander spent the better part of the next half hour alternately experimenting with the storage devices and trying his best not to hyperventilate.

Admittedly he'd had a bit more success with the former than the latter.

Just as Marie had told him, his bag was capable of storing up to twelve unique items, though it turned out that unique had an interesting connotation. At first, the most abundant item he'd been able to locate had been rocks. He had piled the fist-sized stones into the bag one after another in order to test it, each wavering in reality before vanishing into what appeared to be an empty bag. But there seemed to be no limit to just how many the bag could contain or at least a limit far in excess of the mere dozen he'd expected.

Grass, weeds and even a few sticks had joined the contents of the bag before he'd retreated inside in search of other loose objects. TV remote, a shirt, a belt and that infuriating alarm clock, all of these vanished into the bag without hesitation. Ultimately it was a pillow that proved to be too much. He held it just inside the bag, waiting for whatever eldritch forces powered it to do their thing. But there was nothing, even after he shoved the pillow fully inside the brown satchel.

“...Ten, eleven, yeah. I suppose that would have been twelve.” Alexander nodded to himself as he finished counting off the last of the objects he'd stuffed into the bag on the fingers of his left hand.

It seemed that the bag somehow stored like objects with like. There might be a limit to the overall number of rocks he could put inside the satchel, but the whole lot of them appeared to only count as a single item for the purposes of how much it could hold. The same was true of anything else, from sticks to clothing. Three shirts were the same as one, even if the specifics of each one varied.

He sat on the edge of the bed, studying the open bag on the end table. There were no arcane marks, no glowing sigils or signs of advanced technology. It was a beautiful looking, if somewhat obviously homemade bag, but there was nothing about it that should have differentiated it from any of a million other such packs the world over. Other than the fact that it was apparently magical as hell anyways.

Testing its limits had presented him with a new conundrum, however. He'd lost his hoe, his TV remote and a bunch of clothes and he had no idea how to get them back.

"Remote?" He inquired, an open palmed hand digging around in the now empty bag. When that failed, he tried again. "TV Remote. Belt?" Alex listed through half the items he'd stowed away, but it wasn't until he got to rock that he'd had any success, his hand closing around one of the dirty, fist-sized grey stones from the field.

“Aha! Now we're talking.” Alexander let go of the smoothly curved stone, letting the bag take it once again before he cried out triumphantly “Rock!”

Nothing.

“Rock?” Alex's voice was much less sure now as he rummaged around in the still empty bag. “Rock. Ruh-Ock.”

It took several more attempts, repeating the word over and over before the object materialized in his grip and the idea finally took hold in his mind.

"Hoe." He said flatly, visualizing his best memory of the thing as he spoke. It took half a second, but once he had the concept entirely stable in his mind, Alex was rewarded with the sudden sensation of wood against the palm of his hand as the tool warped back into reality.

The issue wasn't how he said it, but what he was thinking of when he reached into the bag. It was a hypothesis that proved correct time and time again as Alex practiced depositing and removing items from the pack.

If Alex had thought that discerning the functions of the apparently magical satchel would ease his growing discomfort, he was sadly mistaken. Once he'd discovered its trick, there was no longer a distraction to keep him from considering the reality that had befallen him. If his little bout of Tyler Durdenism had been worrisome before, what was he supposed to think now? Things had gone from a Skywalkerish 'that's impossible' to more of a 'no really, that is not physically possible' in a heartbeat.

As far as he could tell, there were only a couple of options. The most obvious was that he was dreaming, or perhaps having a stroke. Maybe whatever illness had been hitting him at work had been more severe than he'd realized, and this was all some crazy fever dream while he fought for his life. Or he'd just tripped and cracked his head on the toilet while going to throw up.

That certainly sounded like him.

The other was that this was real. Considering the one resident of this place that he'd met didn't seem to blink an eye at a physics-defying bag; it really wasn't a total stretch of the imagination that something about Blue Hills had messed with his memory. Maybe he really had quit his job, sold his place and taken a train to god knows where to run a farm.

If it was the former, well then nothing he did here mattered. He'd get better or he wouldn't. Unless this was like, one of those weird hallucinations where he had to do the right thing in his dream to force his body to wake up. But Alex was fairly sure those didn't actually exist.

Then again, he was also reasonably certain magical storage bins didn't exist either. But there it was.

On the other hand, if it was the latter, what exactly should he do? If this was reality, could he really leave, or was the train out of town just some red herring that would always be just a month away? If he left, would he have the same sort of memory problems that he had coming here in the first place? Would he actually be able to bring anything if he did? Hell, the most obvious question was 'is it dangerous here,' and he hadn't even begun to answer that one.

There were too many questions, but one thing was for sure. Until he had proof to the contrary, Alex had to assume that this, strange as it was, really was reality.

“There's no place like home?” Alex repeated a few times, still tapping his ankles against one another long after it was clear that it wasn't working.

If he was going to make this work, he needed more information. So far he knew that had a strange currency and reality-warping messenger bags, but somehow Alex suspected that wasn't going to be the end of this madness. He could coast along on being an outsider for a while, but would the rest of the villagers be as welcoming of his ignorance as Marie had been? He couldn't count on it.

“The books!” He exclaimed, the realization striking him in a moment of epiphany. He'd noticed them on his initial pantsless run through the house, and Marie had mentioned them during her spiel. If anything in the house would have information, it'd be those.

Moving with a renewed sense of purpose, Alex leaped from the bed and strode confidently into the living room, smiling at the sight of them. He might not know anything about farming, but digging through mountains of reading material for useful information? That he knew.

The first book proved to be simultaneously important, but useless. It was a leather-bound tome of several hundred pages, but only the inside cover and the first page had any writing at all. The rear of the cover had a simple inscription labeling it as Alexander Adamson's account book, while the first page was split into two columns, with only a single notation in black ink on the left side.

1000 Zeni Credit.

Welcome, Alexander! Good Luck!

Definitely, need to hold onto this one. Alex thought to himself, setting it aside. For a brief moment he pondered fetching his carrying bag and stowing it there so he wouldn't lose it, but he quickly decided against it. Marie would need it out to update it in the morning, wouldn't she? Come to think of it, was there a place he was supposed to leave the book so that she could get at it, or was she just going to walk into the house?

"Because that wouldn't be creepy or anything," Alex said with a laugh as he reached for the next book, making a mental note to see if there was anyone in town who could install a lock.

The second was a slimmer volume of more modern construction that proved to be a journal. His uncle's journal, if he had to guess, for the author's name wasn't written on the cover or anywhere throughout the first entry.

22 spring, Year 2

So I think today is the day.

Still a little nervous after what happened last year, drink thrown in my face and all that. But we've been hitting it off and, well, four hearts have to count for something, right?

Crops are doing well, and I think I have everything timed out correctly so I should have enough time to harvest them all. Should, being the optimum worth mind you.

After the debacle last year? All of those crops gone to waste because I counted to the thirtieth instead of the twenty-eighth? I still kick myself when I think of all of the rookie mistakes I made.

Ha! Come to think of it, is there anything I didn't screw up last year?

Well, wish me luck... uh, future me? I guess?

Pip.

“So that is my uncle, huh?” Alex said with a wry grin. Well, the men in his family shared the crippling insecurity. And the bad habit of getting drinks thrown in their faces at social events.

He flipped to the next page, eager to see how his uncle had fared in his pursuit but was stopped cold in his tracks by what appeared to be a sudden jumble of nonsense symbols. Flipping back, Alex half expected to see the previous page written in the same foreign cipher, but it remained the same handwritten English as before. The same could not be said for the rest of the journal. Page after page of it was filed with the same incomprehensible, block written text, reminding him more of a letter from the Zodiac than anything he'd have expected to see in a journal.

Yet there was a pattern to it, all the same, a pattern he might even be able to decipher, given enough time. The top corner of most pages, for example, had two characters, a space, a string of characters, a space and so on, the same format his uncle had used when he wrote the date on his first entry.

“Now if only I'd paid attention in English.” Alex laughed weakly. One of his high school teachers had held a two-day long event in tenth grade to see which of his students could decode a secret message he had concocted. The class had been given all sorts of tips and hints on how to solve a code just like this one, but Alex hadn't paid much attention at the time. No real world application, he'd thought. Like calculus.

The irony was not lost on him.

Unable to read any further into the journal, Alex turned his attention to the next one. At first glance, it looked like more of the same, another journal of identical design. Probably purchased from at the same store as the first. Upon closer inspection, however, there was one crucial difference. This one was empty, save for a short foreword written again on the rear of the cover.

Dear Alexander,

If I could ask only one more thing of the incredible life I have lived, it would have been to survive long enough to see you in this house, reading this note.

I'm sure you have many questions. Marie will answer the ones she can, and time should help you fill in the rest if you stay.

And I do hope you stay. Nothing will keep you there if you truly wish to leave, and I know hard times are ahead of you if you stay. But I also know what it is like to coast through life, to lack that drive and that struggle.

Blue Hills will bring out the best in you, and I hope that in the process, you can bring out the best in it as well.

All my love,

Pip

"Well, that was unnecessarily cryptic."