In the morning, I had watched Rik trying to cook some of the eggs we had purchased yesterday. Under the [observe] skill, I noted several different threads of aspects uncoil from his bracelet, but I had to drop into the zone for a moment to see what they were doing, it was extremely fast.

He would throw eggs whole into the pan, and activate his cooking skill. Threads of temporal aspect and several other types would descend on the eggs, and he would concentrate for a moment, and then in a heartbeat, there would be fully-prepared scrambled eggs, no shells, already mixed, and almost always scorched or half-cooked at the end.

“This stupid mini-game” he muttered as he fished the eggs out and scraped them into a bowl. He did not look particularly happy, but I was curious about the process.

“How does it work?” I asked him.

“You put the ingredients in the pan, and then there is a bar with two little marks and a little wave going up and down on the bar. The closer to the middle between the two marks you get, the better your result is. My skill is really low and cannot improve because I didn’t pick it as a crafting skill, so the gap is tiny and the wave moves really fast. I figure your skill is high enough that you have a giant gap and the wave probably moves at a crawl, which might be why it takes so long for you to cook. Or maybe you pick to do it manually?”

I chuckled, “I always do everything manually, but when I was growing up, my aunt would have tanned my hide if I couldn’t do basic cooking. I have pretty much zero interest in any mini-game when cooking eggs is so simple.”

Rik grumbled, “I have never cooked anything, except in the microwave. I never really saw anything cooked except when my parents took me to a food theater and I saw folks making fried tofu and tossing dough for pizza.” He chuckled, “That stew is everywhere, most Innes and camps serve almost the same stuff, which all tastes mostly the same, I didn’t even realize that they had coded in more flavors until that rice stuff you made last night, I thought you just had cheap rations, like bread, expensive rations like we bought, and you could eat stew fresh, which gives you a well-rested buff if you sleep in a bed.”

He shrugged, “I mean, you can cook monster parts if you get them, on a spit or in a pan, and they taste okay, but again, not that good at it, and even if the parts have a bonus attached, if you cook them badly you can get a sickened debuff at the same time.”

I started pulling out more of those wonderful mushrooms as well as some herbs and spices. “Would you like to see how to make some fancy eggs manually? I promise they will taste better than that stuff, and girls are impressed by a guy that can cook.”

Rik nodded eagerly, and I put him to work chopping mushrooms, onions, some of the less hot peppers, the last of the celery, some Lamb’s quarter, and some water root buds that I hadn’t tried personally but my [observe] assured me were edible. They smelled vaguely like a cross between turnips and potatoes, and a lick indicated that they were starchy rather than sweet and not particularly woody, so I figured they’d work to add some carbs and cook a lot like any other roots. The boy turned out to have a knack for cutting things and quickly got better, and I assumed that his blade skills were helping him.

“The first thing to do is to make sure that the pan is nice and hot, and add some fat. We don’t have any meat other than sausages and ham right now, but the ham needs to be boiled or soaked when it’s salted like it is, and we had the sausages last night. They will keep for a while, so we are going to use up the last of the eggs before they go bad.” I explained, scraping a bit of lard we had purchased at a market into the pan. It wasn’t the purest, but it was filtered enough that it didn’t smell like old meat or sour.

Rik nodded, and I had him scrape the chopped vegetables into the oil when a drop of water showed it was sizzling hot. “The thing is, frittatas are one of the most forgiving dishes you can make. It should be hot but the exact temperature doesn’t matter as long as you don’t burn it, and when the fillers have little bits of brown, called caramelization, you just throw in some pepper and salt, add garlic if you have some, and bam! Keep any eye and scrape it around till the eggs look done. If the pan’s hotter, the eggs cook quicker, if it’s cooler, they cook more slowly, but either way, they taste good.”

I watched him push the frying stuff around the pan, “The thing is, because of the way it cooks, you can add almost anything, even a lot of wild greens that aren’t too bitter, and it just improves the taste and texture. Once you know how to cook it, it’s like that Jambalaya I made last night, it can accept a ton of substitutions and still work. See how the onions turned clear and the roots are kinda getting brown? That means it’s time to add the eggs.”

I started cracking the eggs two at a time and dropping them into the mixed veggies, adding some salt, pepper, and garlic to them. “Mostly it’s just about trying it a lot, and not adding too much seasonings, or they might get over-salted or too hot from the pepper. See how quickly the eggs cook?” I started thinly slicing some somewhat grainy goat cheese we had bought over it, brushing off the spots where the tallow packet had let the cheese dry out. “You just take it off the heat while it’s still hot, melt some cheese over it by slicing or grating it on, and then putting it near the fire for a few minutes, and boom! Fancy breakfast food that tastes great.”

Mostly I had allowed him to cook it under my careful supervision, and apparently, it was more than enough. As we ate, Rik got a notice that he could copyright and name another dish. I was sort of disgusted when he chose ‘Wild Fattatas’, but hey, it was his choice, and made him happy. “I can accept the cooking skill now as a trade skill, but I am going to hold off and see if something better is available since it looks like you can manually craft even if you don’t have the crafting skill,” He exclaimed, and I could not fault his logic.

It also gave us a temporary boost to essence and experience gain for the next twelve hours, for a total of 100% between last night’s meal and this morning. After cleaning up all the cooking junk and the campsite, which took some finagling and rolling on my part, but Shiana accomplished just by tugging the stakes on the pavilion out of the ground and letting it snap back into a magically tight bundle, we were ready to go.

I had helped Cassie with her tent after I rolled my tarp up, and felt pretty good. Despite the sleep interruption last night from standing a watch, which navy life had gotten me very used to over the years, I had slept extremely well, with nary an ache or pain at all. Well-fed, well-rested, and feeling optimistic, I knew Murphy was planning to ambush us, and I didn’t really care. Being on a team was surprisingly uplifting, an unexpected bonus.

After crossing the bridge, we followed the stream for some distance before I began to recognize some of the things I had passed earlier. “We are close,” I whispered, even though Cassie’s armor was about as quiet as a blacksmith’s shop and Rik seemed to never meet a single piece of noisy forest litter he didn’t want to stomp. I suppose he wasn’t a stealth class, but I couldn’t help but be irritated at not having the slightest chance to approach the goblins unaware.

“Cassie and I are not going to be able to sneak up,” Rik began. At least he recognized the fact, and I realized that he was probably a veteran of MMOs, even if his real-world skills lacked. “So the two of us will go up the middle. Shiana, do your woods walking thing, and Mae, I know you can be unseen. If you can hide, Bran, go ahead and stay clear so we can hit them while they are distracted by us, and if not, stay well back until the fight starts so you can use your rocks to whack ‘em from a distance. Goblins are not too tough, and we can use the chance to figure out how we can work together.”

“Were you a raid leader?” I asked him while the two girls vanished.

He shook his head, “Nope, back in Kingdom Quest I led a bunch of ten or fifty mini-raids, but the big 500 person raids require a serious commitment, usually only class C or higher citizens can do it, and it’s a full-time job that required a ton of hardware and custom software to get all the fiddling details it takes to succeed. I usually prefer to main or off tank, but with school, I couldn’t afford all it takes to make the big raids. You get one detail wrong, mistime one epic boss effect, or one person screws up, and the entire raid wipes.”

He shrugged a little, “I just didn’t have that kind of head for math and timing stuff. I’d rather grab a pick-up or guild group, make sure we have the four staples of healing, DPS, crowd control, and tanking, and have fun. I mean, professional Raid leaders make the big bucks and get the fame, but my guardians are public service, which means I got an in with Social Resources Enforcement. I’d rather just cruise the net looking for social terrorists and actually have a personal life than spend all my time organizing raids, researching, and having to watch my mouth on blog interviews. One wrong word and your butt is busted back to a non-citizen, and that’d kill my moms since they worked so hard to get into SRE.”

Raid leaders were professionals? Like, you get up, drink your coffee, and then sit down and spend the next 8 hours, day after day, researching raids for upwards of 500 people, knowing that, like an engineering project, one wrong move and you might lose your career or hurt lots of people? “Is it like that here?” I asked the oversized teenager.

Rik shook his head, “Nope, not yet at least, but then, I didn’t get into the beta, and beta testers aren’t allowed to post about the world. The company even got a contract with SRE to find and prosecute rogue betas, so NOTHING got onto the net. But from what I have seen, advancement itself is pretty darned hard, so they might not have or need elite end-game content. Since gold here is tied to the company’s own crypto, you could earn a decent living outside just by like… baking bread or something, and with the time compression, Antowyn’s probably going to leave all the others in the dust. That’s why I pre-purchased all of the DLC to get a head start.”

He smiled brightly, which looked a little creepy inside the helmet with that Spartacus chin. “If we can make bank in here, I wouldn’t even have to work for SRE. With the time compression, I could sleep-game every night, work part of the day, and then have the time and money I need to get a repro license. My moms would be SO proud!”

I nodded understandingly, even though I didn’t understand half of what he said. What was crypto? Or a Repro, like a kind of car? Flying cars would be cool. Or jet packs. Hoverboards like Back to the Future 2 would kick ass, but I doubted that even in 70 years someone would have mastered the force field or antigravity that would be needed to make them work.

I split at that point, nodding to him before stepping away from him and Cassie. She had just seemed to completely ignore our conversation like she didn’t even hear it, but while I despaired of hiding during the daylight with the blue skin and white crest, I could at least stick to the woods and stay away from the noise.

Surprisingly enough, once I got into deeper shadows, I blended pretty well despite the screaming colors. The blue blended well into the shadows, and the white was just bits of tree bark in the underbrush.

Your stealth skill has improved to journeyman poor

We didn’t encounter any watchers, and I finally spotted the rock wall with the cave. I slipped up to Rik quietly, and said, “There it is." There was something odd about it, but in the sunlight, my eyesight was sharply restricted. Shiana joined us a moment later, and murmured, “Bodies.” While her conversation might have been limited, clearly her combat role was extremely sapient and alert.

Mae appeared. I mean, she just appeared in front of us. “The Cave is surrounded by dead goblins,” she stated, looking worried. “I scouted it a bit, but I didn’t go in. Something tore them apart, there are pieces of goblins scattered as well as bodies, but it looked more like a battle than just a monster. I didn’t smell any blood other than goblin, but I did smell some other stink that I couldn’t identify.”

“What did it smell like?” I asked her, as Rik turned to whisper something to Shiana. Mae’s reply was interesting. “Kind of like… if you eat a plate of cooked meat, and then toss the plate with bits of fat and bones and stuff in the corner and forget to clean it up later, and it dries out, but without all the spices or sauces you might put on the food. It just smelled like the trash, but strong, and recent, if smelling old recent trash makes sense.”

Rik and I both said the word at the same time. “Undead.” But only I said ‘jinx’ afterward. He didn’t get it. Even with my limited gaming knowledge living creatures torn to pieces along with the smell of old bones was as distinctive as missing brains or corpses drained of blood with bite marks on their necks.

Cassie spoke, “Goblins aren’t deep dwellers like dwarves or kobolds. They live in caves sometimes because they are convenient and dark, but they tend to hunt and raid on the surface like most monster races.”

I added, “I was in the cave, but I didn’t explore it. It looked like a temporary place to hide for a raiding party. There weren’t any baby goblins or anything, and I don’t know if the males and females look different, but I didn’t see anything like a tribal family setup or anything.”

Cassie nodded, her helmet bobbing as she added, “Male and female goblins are as different as most races, the females are smaller and weaker and usually get treated like slaves. If you had seen females you would know it. They usually stick to the camp, and when the males raid, they are left behind with a few… protectors. The guards keep them safe and make sure they don’t escape. Goblins also crossbreed true, so their females often include other races like gnomes or halflings if they catch them.”

Rik nodded, “Well, at least the closest halfling settlement is Mancy Hills, and it is several days away according to my map, and well protected. Childers is pretty close by though, but unlike orcs, goblins won’t capture humans for ransom or slaves. Too big. They just uhh… eat humans.”

We were almost to the caves, and I could smell blood and rotting meat. This was a bit more evidence that this world wasn’t a game if I hadn’t had enough. Slain monsters in games disappear after a while, they don’t lay around and rot.

“So the question is, if there are undead deeper in the caves that were disturbed by the goblins, do we risk it? Or turn back? We have the supplies we need for a couple of days of exploration as well as some lightstones and waterskins, and of course, we have a kobold and dwarf in the party so we won’t get lost underground, but while this zone is newbie-friendly, I hadn’t heard about undead out this way. We could be facing anything.” Rik asked.

Cassie responded, “It might be a new node or disturbed crypt, or even a new dungeon. The Undead came this far out to kill the goblins, and there’s a lot of death around here now. If we don’t clean it out it could start a serious infestation, or if we find out it’s a dungeon it has started spawning walkers and needs to be culled and reported.

Rik smiled wickedly, “If it’s a new dungeon we get finder’s fees, first delve bonuses, and the churches might even give us a bonus for finding a new threat. I say we go ahead and try to find it and clean it out. Even if it’s a node or a one-shot, we can collect the node and sell it or clear the one-shot for some serious rewards.”

Cassie nodded slowly, “The only thing that worries me is the lack of expendables. My healing is pretty weak right now, and if it’s undead I might be better off using my energy for disruption. We don’t have much in the way of potions, or a true healer in case we get badly hurt, and my good stuff doesn’t come in until much later. Brogan’s not a god of healing."

We looked at Mae, and she responded, “Not a healer, and illusions don’t work on undead. I will be limited to elemental magic which is not my specialty. That being said, Cassie IS a Paladin and this kind of stuff is right up her alley. This would be a good chance to grow in strength and as Rik said, the profit potential is enormous. Yes, we could be overwhelmed, but even if the rest of us are creamed, Cassie has escape options and we will be reborn.”

Okay, maybe the rest of THEM would be reborn, but I had no such assurances. Might work, might not, but I needed to grow and with my new ability to move in zone, I could probably escape in an emergency. Profit also sounded nice.

“I haven’t played with alchemy yet, but I have some of the tools,” I began, “I also found a lot of herbs and a few other things, like Natron, that are associated with healing. I might be able to at least make some kind of food or something that could help us during downtime, and I am willing to experiment with alchemy a little bit. I think we should explore it, especially since the goblins had some loot as well.”

Rik added, “I still have a solid three days until mandatory timeout. That should be enough to figure this out and get some levels and loot.”

Shiana chose this moment to add her opinion to the mix as well. “I think we should explore this adventure location and gain experience. At higher levels, my sentience will increase and I will be much more responsive. I will eventually unlock a class that will allow me to add magical effects to my ranged attacks, and we should be able to venture into Fey Gallinian without being attacked. I am also an expert in woodlore, and if you need some information on local lore you have but to ask and I might be able to assist you.”

Well, Shiana’s deeply-reasoned argument immediately ended the question in favor of exploration, as it was just impossible to argue with her profound logic. With me in the lead, for now, we picked our way between the shredded goblins and into the bloodsoaked cave.