We didn’t get lost and starve in the wilderness, though our flight from the mad pig did take us far out of the way. For the first time, I couldn’t help feeling a little resentment that most of our ABILITIES were capped at 1% except for, apparently, when dealing directly with SCHEMA. The only ABILITIES I had over 1% were those that had come directly through my conversations with SCHEMA during the INFORMATION section of the BEGINNER TUTORIAL.

So, when we were creeping our way back through the forest to where my gut told me the CRAFTING area was, I couldn’t help but resent the fact that all this sneaking wasn’t raising my STEALTH percentage one whit. In the end, I had to just satisfy myself that we weren’t dying or fighting for our lives. That, of course, made me really think about the differences in life before and after SCHEMA.

SCHEMA had to be both the best and the worst thing to ever happen to us. The worst, because SCHEMA put Hitler and Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot to shame when it came to genocide, but there was no denying that the system it installed had definite, almost addictive benefits. The instantaneous reward system of gaining and growing SKILLS and ABILITIES being one of the most alluring. Even though I hadn’t begun to level up and really start growing my stat points, yet, the limited gains I’d been able to make seemed to have an outsized effect even at zero levels. I could already tell the differences in my strength, concentration, and my ability to stick to my guns once I’d decided a course of action was just insane. All the waffling back and forth and second guessing myself just seemed to have fallen away as my WILLPOWER shot up.

But still, was it worth 75% of humanity dying off? Was anything worth that? My knee-jerk reaction said no, but I had to look at the big picture, play the long game. SCHEMA promises that the change is the only thing that would make Earth—and us poor primitive native Humans—able to compete in the greater universe outside of our solar system. I had to consider that in my deliberations, but it was kind of hard, since the feat had already been accomplished. I had no way of knowing if I’d ever get a real chance to see how things would have worked out if we’d just been left alone; after all, we’d managed to survive and overcome quite a lot in the relatively miniscule time we’d existed.

Besides, just in the short time I’d lived in the SCHEMA system, I’d seen the cracks in the façade. Stellana wasn’t supposed to have been able to set that trap during our COMBAT training, and April had promised us that there were no larger and aggressive animals in our HUNTING area. I was quickly growing tired of SCHEMA’s broken promises.

The sound of hammer on anvil jarred me out of my reverie, and I realized we’d finally made it back. I glanced over at the kid and we shared a quick smile that made my face feel wooden. I can only imagine the look I must have had on it the whole time we’d been creeping through the forest. I don’t know if I even wanted to review my RECORD video, I was afraid of what emotion I might see frozen on my face for so long.

We came out of STEALTH and my joints let me know that they’d been locked down for too long, as well. It took us both a few stumbling steps, but by the time we made it back into the clearing, most of the stiffness had worked its way out. I don’t know if my internal compass was just that good, or if it were SCHEMA up to its tricks, but we exited the woods by the same path we’d entered. April’s smiling face was a sight for sore eyes, but when she got a good look at us, it turned into one of alarm.

“Oh! What happened to you! Did you fall out of a tree?” She asked coming over and taking hold of both sides of the long tear I hadn’t even noticed in the kid’s right sleeve. I looked down, and sure enough, my left sleeve was the mirror of his. It must have happened when that mama pig hit us. I hadn’t realized that she’d hit the kid, too, but she must have.

“We had a run in with one of those small, non-aggressive animals you told us about,” I said, like I was just joking, but my tone betrayed the resentment I was feeling over the whole situation. “A mama pig took a dislike to us and we were lucky to escape with only torn sleeves.”

“A BIG mama pig!” The kid added, like he was talking abut going to Disneyland. “it was HUGE!” He threw his arms wide, inadvertently jerking his sleeve out of April’s fingers. The hurt look on her face told me she took that wrong, but the kid didn’t notice.

I thought maybe I should say something, but I learned long ago that I wasn’t the arbiter of other people’s feelings, and when you apologize for someone else’s mistakes, it never really makes up for it.

“Well..” she said, while she tried to decide what to do with her rebuked hands. She finally ended up crossing them under her amble chest and I turned my eyes away, moving towards the place where she’d obviously laid out the supplies to clean our kills.

Seeing where I was headed, she made a quick recovery, deciding to just move on. “I’ve got everything ready for you over here, just unload the game on those skins and I’ll teach you a better way to clean than the quick job you probably made of it back in the COMBAT section.

The kid could tell that something had upset her, but I could see from the confusion on his open face that he didn’t know what. He started to say something, but I caught his eye and gave a tiny shake of my head and he shut up. If I’d learned anything about women, if you don’t know what you did wrong, trying to apologize would just make it worse.

“Come on kid, time to show how much better of a mighty hunter you are than me!” I put as much joviality in my voice as I could muster. Truly, I was only a little upset about the whole pig thing, shit happens when you’re out in the wild and you just had to deal with it. Pointing fingers never made up for anything, in my experience.

“Right,” he agreed. The quick change from puzzled to happy said he’d put the incident aside like it never happened. Oh, the resilience of youth! I might be physically young again, but nothing could give me back my innocence and all the hope I’d pissed away or had stolen from me.

“You should really have a top hat, for doing that,” I said, laughing as he pulled rabbit after rabbit out of thin air.

“I know, right?” he laughed.

I unloaded all of my birds all at once and looked to where April hadn’t moved. I noticed the unfocused look in her eye that told me she was doing something with her MENU, so I just left her to it. “Let’s unload all of our veggies on the table over there,” I said so the kid wouldn’t start worrying about her hurt feelings again.

I know, I said I’d learned better, but learning not to do something and making yourself stop are two different things. I sighed, and the kid shot me a puzzled look, but I smiled and shook my head, and we unloaded our greens on the table.

By the time we’d made it back to the game, April finished whatever it was she’d been doing, and she’d regained her composure, too. “Oh, those are some fine fat partridges!” she exclaimed when she saw my birds. “They’ll taste delicious stuffed with some of the onions, garlic, and rosemary you brought back!”

“I’m glad to find out what kind of birds they are. I’m no expert, but somehow I’ve got the impression that all the birds that are good to eat live on the ground, but these were all up in trees.”

“Well, they do next on the ground,” she answered, “but they’ll often perch on tree limbs. You’ll also find that SCHEMA seems to prefer things a certain way: birds in trees, animals on the ground, like that. It’s as if the system feeds into our expectations about things. I think that’s part of what makes MANA work, it works on our INTELLIGENCE, primarily, and secondarily on our WILLPOWER, so what we expect often affects how reality works in SCHEMA system worlds. We expect to find birds in trees more than we expect to find them on the ground, so we do.”

I was getting interested in the conversation and wanted to pick her brain some more on how SCHEMA had affected her and her world—and just where she’d come from, for one big thing, since it didn’t make any sense for her to be advanced enough to train and come from Earth—but the kid’s teenage competitiveness over feminine attention got the better of him and he broke into the conversation.

“I guess it’s time to learn the best way to skin these, I’m starting to get hungry!”

OK, maybe his hormones had a little help from his stomach. Mine gave its own growl right then, letting me know that my mind may be old, but my body still had the appetite of a growing child.

April laughed at that and said, “Of course, you two must be famished! Tom, don’t worry about skinning your birds, just use this knife here and make a shallow cut along the midline like this, so you can remove the internal organs. I’ll show you a neat little trick that will save us the trouble of plucking them after I get Rob started with his rabbits.”

She showed Rob then how to make a shallow slice just deeply enough to cut all the way through the skin, but not into the meat, just below the head, but on the back, not the stomach, like I’d expected. Then she showed him where to cut around the ends of each limb where they were too boney to be any good for eating. She made it look quick and easy, putting the fingers of each hand in the hole in its back and deftly pulling the skin away from the carcass, gently loosening it all the way around as she went.

“If you don’t want to save the skins for anything, you can make the first cut lower down on the back, and then you don’t have to pull it so carefully. Rabbit skins are very delicate and tear easily. You can do the whole thing without using a knife at all, which is a lifesaver if you’re ever caught out in the woods without one. On the next one, I’ll show you how to gut one without using a knife. It’s actually quite amusing.”

First though, after she’d removed the skin and set it aside, with quick sure movements she broke all the legs at the ankles and sliced through the tendons and ligaments to remove the feet, leaving the skin on them when she discarded them. She broke the neck, and cut it free, as well. Then, she showed us how to pinch the skin and pull it away from the lower abdomen, and carefully slice all the way upwards following the centerline to where she’d cut off the head. Then, she cut through the breastbone to expose the thoracic organs, showed us how to place our fingers at the top of the thoracic cavity and gently, but firmly pull downward until all of the guts had been removed. She cut through the pelvis, and scraped out the remains of the colon, and removed the bits of skin and the tail that hadn’t come free when she pulled the skin off.

“Some of the organs, like the gall bladder, have secretions that will completely ruin the meat for eating. If you puncture the intestines or the bladder, you can get a serious infection from eating the meat.” She cautioned us. She identified the heart, liver, and kidneys and told us that they made for good eating, too. “But you should always check the liver to make sure it’s deep red, like this one. If it looks strange, or has spots or a light color, I wouldn’t eat it. It’s a sure sign that the animal may carry some disease that might make you ill.”

“Now, this is how you eviscerate a rabbit if you don’t have a knife available.” She said as she indicated to each of us that we should follow her example with the two remaining bunnies. “Grab it here, just at what you might think of as its armpits. Press all the way around the body firmly and squeeze it down towards the bottom. We’re popping that membrane between the upper and lower body and forcing the organs downward. When you reach the end of the rib cage, grasp it firmly in both hands…careful!” She stopped to correct my grip, “don’t let up on the pressure, you don’t want any of the organs to make their way back up inside. Now, grasp it firmly in both hands like this with the tops of your hands facing the bottom of the rabbit. Now, standing up, hold it firmly between your legs…no, spread your legs wider, Rob, or you’ll get it all over yourself. Now, raise the rabbit up…keep the pressure on your grip, Tom, don’t let the organs slide back down, and then with one quick motion we’re going to jerk it forcefully downwards and swing it through our legs. Watch me, and then you try it.”

I wouldn’t call the end result as all the poor rabbits’ internal organs were thusly forced out its body through its asshole and sprayed all across the ground behind us to be amusing, but the kid sure got a laugh out of it. It took me a few swings before April thought I’d got all the organs out, and I could see what she meant about keeping a wide stance as I had to wipe some of the guts off the inside of my pants’ leg, but we got it done, and she showed us how to use a sharp stick to punch the hole through the back of the hide and how to break and twist the feet off at the ankles and the head at the neck. She used the stick again to punch through the thin layer of skin around the now empty abdominal cavity and scraped out the tattered remains of membrane with her hand.

When I’d finished with my rabbit, I heard the DING which told me I’d gotten the CLEANING ABILITY, already. As I was washing up from that, I took a moment and checked, and there it was alongside the HUNTING ABILITY, which we’d apparently missed in the mad rush away from the big pig.

For my birds, we just pinched the skin over the abdomen and sliced it carefully up to the neck. She broke the wings off at the second joint and cut those, the feet, and the head away. Then, she instructed us to sit the birds aside until we’d sorted out the vegetables and herbs. After we’d done that, we stuffed the birds with some onion and garlic chunks mixed with sprigs of rosemary, and she marched us over to a stream that ran near one edge of the clearing to gather some clay which we packed around the whole thing.

“This makes it to where you don’t have to pluck or skin them. It also gives you a great oven to roast them in. Just put them in the coals of the fire like this, and soon enough, we can break open the fired clay and when we pull the clay away, all the feathers and skin will pull away with it. The drippings will have stayed inside, and the meat and vegetables will be cooked to perfection and be tender, juicy, and delicious!”

We grilled two of the rabbits on a spit made from two forked limbs and spitted the rabbits together on a long stick over the coals of the fire. The others, we sliced off the bone and threw the pieces with some vegetables and some herbs for spice into a pot for a stew.

On the way back from our run-in with the pig, we’d found samples of all three of the stat regenerating herbs: Star King, Lady’s Heart, and Troll’s Mane. She added the leaves from the Lady’s Heart into the stew pot and made a paste of the flowers that she rubbed on the outside of the rabbits we grilled. She chopped the Troll’s Mane finely and put it in the pot, and wadded up the rest and covered the open part of the bird’s cavities so that none of the vegetables would get stuck with the clay.

While we waited on the food to cook, she had us roll the rabbit skins up and slot them away for later. “If you have to cut a skin open to pull it off, like on a large animal like a deer or one with an extremely thick hide, be sure and fold the fur side together so that the bloody skin side won’t come in contact with the fur before you roll it for storage. Unlike what you may have been used to before, with the way your CRAFTING inventory works, you don’t have to rush to stretch and tan them, they’ll keep without getting stiff or turning rancid until you have the time to get to them, later.

We took some plates of the finished stew around to the other trainees at the other CRAFTING stations. The elf girl was already gone, along with the gnomes, but the group of trainees that had come behind us in the COMBAT section had arrived, and so we fed them, too. We sampled some of all of our efforts, but April showed us that we could simply put the leftovers on a plate, in a bowl, or wrap in leaves, and slot them directly into our regular INVENTORY.

“Don’t worry about them spilling, everything comes out of your inventory just the same way you put it in. If you’re holding the plate upright in your hand when you slot it, it will come out just the same way. It won’t spoil, no matter how long you leave it there, and cold food won’t get warm, and hot food won’t get cold. Keep the plates and bowls to remember me by,” she smiled with genuine good will.

As soon as we’d slotted all of our leftovers, I got the DING that informed me that I had successfully acquired the COOKING SKILL. The kid and I decided that we would continue on and learn the last two skills while we had the chance. Since he’d started on WOODWORKING, and I’d started on SMITHING, we decided to switch and take the one we hadn’t done, and then finish up in the TAILORING section together.

As we were starting to get up to walk away, the smile slipped off her face and she grew solemn. “Before you go, I just wanted to tell you that I filed a support ticket with the Administration about having to deal with that pig. I received a message in response that let me know that they would take care to remove the pig before the next trainee goes into the forest. The message also said that an Administrator was reviewing the incident, and that your RECORDS of the time had been copied as evidence. I haven’t heard anything further, so I don’t know what will come of it, but I want to assure you that I, at least, do not take what happened to you lightly. I believe that SCHEMA is also concerned with keeping training areas safe for trainees. Seeing the look of skepticism on my face, she added, “I know it may not seem that way for you, Tom, since this is now the second incident you’ve suffered in the BEGINNER TUTORIAL, but I do believe that it was something that rarely ever happens, and that SCHEMA will work diligently to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

I looked at her for a few moments and then gave her a nod. “I believe that you didn’t know anything about the pig being in the woods. I don’t see how it’s possible that SCHEMA, who put all the animals in there, after all, didn’t know, but I’ll reserve judgment for now. As to doing something to make sure it never happens again, I’ve learned that saying that is either a platitude or ignorance. So much of what happens to us is affected by things that are beyond anything we can control. Freaks of nature, acts of God, whatever you want to call it, random things that nobody could have predicted happen every day, somewhere, and nothing anyone could have done in advance could have stopped them.” She looked like she would argue with that, so I went on, “I understand that we can do things to make …accidents, or whatever caused it less likely to happen, but nobody can make it to where unexpected bad things never happen.” I softened my words with a smile, but I wouldn’t take them back, even to spare her feelings, and I could tell by the hurt look on her face that I hadn’t.

I guess a philosophical chat about our origins and SCHEMA was probably not in the picture, anymore.