There were folks already clustered in front of most of the leantos by the time we made it into camp. Hunter left us calling out for Jeri, and Debbie and I stuck together without really discussing it. I noticed Tim and Angie in front of one of the huts, arranging some rocks into a circle.

“What’s up, Tim? Got room for a couple more people in this one?”

“It’s just me and Angie, so sure. Ever since I made an unsuccessful bid for leadership everybody has treated me like a pariah. Thanks ever so much for that, Jack.”

Debbie snorted and looked at me.

“Jack, a pariah is somebody nobody likes very much.”

I flipped her off, but she introduced herself to Angie like she hadn’t just roasted me without provocation. Instead of responding I used her distracting Angie as an opportunity to restart my conversation with Tim.

“I’ve got something that will rehabilitate your image. Everybody loves the guy who brings fried chicken to the party.”

“Are you telling me you’ve got enough fried chicken to feed us all?”

“Well, no. I’ve got a shit ton of dead knifewings though. Come with me to hand ‘em out?”

Angie and Debbie were already plucking the birds Debbie had carried and when Tim checked in with them before we left they told us to bring back a lit brand for the fire.

“If everyone’s just been borrowing a lit branch, how’d the first guy get his fire started.”

“It was Ken. You should have seen it, it was hilarious.”

It didn’t take much urging to get Tim to tell the story, and he did as we went around from leanto to leanto, handing out dead birds. There were a bunch of pauses as folks said hi, and introductions that I can’t really recall, so I’ll leave that stuff out so you can get the story as he told it.

“You can tell he’s smart cause of the coveralls right? I mean, he gets a full outfit for probably less than I spent on just my T-shirt. But apparently he’s a real gamer ‘cause he spent the rest of his points on mana and learning a fireball spell.”

“That actually sounds kinda cool, Tim.”

He made a kind of half snort, half laugh sound.

“That’s what he thought. So he tells everybody this, and sets up over by the bonfire to cast his fireball, and goes all Goku on it.”

“Huh?”

“You know, kam i ham i ha.”

He made a double punching gesture in the air but slowly like some kind of half assed tai chi and I just stared at him.

“DragonBall Z, Jack. You must have been like no fun in the real world. Anyway, he goes all out to cast this big fireball, and it was like getting close to a blow dryer. Well, I was kind of off to the side so I guess it was hotter right up front. Still, he cast his spell like five times until some of the little branches started to smolder. Eventually the whole thing caught, but I guess you have to level up any skills you buy until they’re even mildly useful. Man was he pissed.”

At that point we were done as bird distributors and were headed back to our leanto. Tim went to beg a light from the closest fire while I stepped into the tree line to try and round up some more branches. By the time I found stuff suitable for what I wanted and made my way back, Debbie, Tim, and Angie were all holding skewers of bird over the fire. Hunter and a short brunette chick I guess must be Jeri had found their way over to our campfire and settled in as well.

“Hey, guys.”

Everyone nodded or said hi, but everyone stuck in the current conversation as I found a place to sit down. It sounded pretty interesting so I just sat quietly and listened as I unpacked my gear. They were comparing prices of stuff they’d seen in the XP shop, and discussing strategies to prioritize what they should get next. It seemed to be a three way split between weapons to handle the monsters, tools to gather resources and build some sort of civilization, and a few creature comforts to make life bearable in the short term. A couple of ideas that got thrown out there made me adjust my own mental list, so I just kept quiet and worked.

After I’d stretched and pegged out the wolf hide, I noticed everyone got quiet and looked over to see them staring at me. Tim spoke up first.

“What exactly are you doing with that stuff, Jack?”

“What’s it look like? I’m tanning the fur. I don’t have all the stuff I’d like, but I ought to be able to make do.”

“You really are like a mountain man or something.”

“Country boy, remember, Tim?”

“Show us.”

I cut the claws off all the crabadillos first and stuck them on some coals. I wasn’t having knifewing when there was a better option. After that though, I skinned the first crabadillo body. I went slow explaining how to peel without tearing as I went. I handed over my knife and Hunter took the next one, and Debbie the third. We went on like that, through scraping the flesh to cracking the skull and rubbing the brains into the skin side of the hide. I’d always used the commercial stuff that came in a green bottle in the past, but I’d pulled up my recently acquired book of knowledge. After a quick scan through wikipedia I had some options. The most promising was obtaining tannins from acorns, but I hadn’t seen any actual oak trees yet. The next best thing was emulsified brains. After checking the wiki I told ‘em some folks piss on the hide to help tan it, but nobody was interested in experimenting. Eventually we had all the bodies I’d brought back processed. The hides were pegged out to dry, the sinew in a pile for later, the meat over a little green branch smoking rack I hoped wouldn’t catch fire, and I went and threw the rest into the woods.

About the time I came back into camp there was a commotion around one of the fires and everyone kind of meandered over to figure out what was going on. Seems like somebody had cut a bunch of pine boughs as a bed, and when he got it in place he hit some kind of minimum threshold for the game. It designated their leanto as a hovel that accrued a quarter improvement point a day. The improvement points could only be spent on that particular hovel. About half the camp went rushing out into the dark to try and find pine branches, but Tim gathered all of our little clique together before anybody took off.

“Look, a hovel sounds pretty shitty to me. Instead of trying to duplicate what he did, let’s improve upon it. The game recognized a piece of furniture and a single wall as a hovel, what if we made some improvements before we put in a bed?”

Hunter was nodding along before he even finished speaking.

“What kind of improvements?”

Debbie answered before Tim had a chance to.

“How about a front wall, and maybe some partitions? I don’t know about the rest of ya’ll but I for one wouldn’t mind a little privacy sometimes.”

That seemed a little impractical so I cut in.

“Put in a fireplace, or at least a chimney and a firepit. If it gets cold we’ll want one on the inside.”

Tim waved his hands like an excited school kid.

“All of it. Whatever we can get done in the next couple of hours. I’ll help Jack with the fireplace. Angie, will you help Debbie with some partitions. Jeri, you and Hunter get started on the outside wall. Whenever one group gets done just fall in on another group and we’ll get this knocked out.”

Everyone agreed and we split up into our little groups. Tim walked with me back towards the leanto.

“So, uh, Jack. You ever built a fireplace before?”

“Kind of. I’ve built a couple barbecues and a woodstove. You got a couple 55 gallon drums and a welder on you and I’ll crank one out that’ll curl your hair.”

“Going to have to be a bit more primitive than that, I’m afraid. I was thinking we could build it out of stones.”

“Cause you like shrapnel? Rocks can blow up if they get hot. You gotta buy fire bricks.”

“Explosive decompression if there’s water trapped in the pores. I am a science teacher, remember? We could cook it out of them. Slow build up of heat so most won’t break, or maybe just bury them and put a roaring fire on top. Only use the ones that don’t break underground.”

“That sounds like a hell of a lot of work. I think I might just check a few prices at the XP store.”

He stopped and stared at me, but I just cut away and jogged over to the door. The same green loading screen came again. It was kind of comforting at this point. I remember how the tokens reacted last time, so I held the bag open and pointed forward as soon as I cleared the doorway. Sure enough they whipped out of my messenger bag and before too long I saw a floating screen.

187,943XP points available. Upgrade to Level 2?

Apparently there were benefits to massacring a flock of knifewings. There was stuff I needed to buy, but XP seemed easy enough to come by so I chose ‘yes’. It gave me 10 character points to spend, and again my choices were stats, skills, and spells. I figured I had most of the skills I’d need for this kind of game, and since spells hadn’t been very useful for anyone else, I focused on stats again.

Health 100 Health Regen .801 Brawn 6 Intelligence 6 Reflexes 8.5 Mana 0 Mana Regen 0

Health regen had really saved my ass last time, but it felt like I’d already stocked it up. Ken’s fireball spell had sucked but it had lit the fire. This wasn’t David Copperfield with mirrors and slight of hand, but real live Gandalf type shit. I dropped a point into Mana and the number rolled up to 5 and Mana Regen went to .001. That was cool, two for the price of one. I put another point into Mana and it rolled up to 10 but Mana Regen stayed .001. Okay, so I guess mana entails at least some mana regen, but the two weren’t bound together. I didn’t know what the numbers meant, so I flipped over to spells now that it wasn’t grayed out anymore.

There were too many options but I was an old hand at this now. I called up the autosort and filtered out everything that took more than 10 mana and cost more than 8 character points. Several of them dropped away but there were still at least a hundred options. I added a filter for combat spells and it was still more than I wanted to read through. I took a second to think about what I wanted. In the end I had a lot of practice and training of fighting without magic, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to try and shoehorn a new response in among the old reflexes. Instead I wanted some kind of passive ability, a spell I could cast beforehand that would help me out while I fought on my own. I tried to articulate that to the autosort, because it had picked up on natural language before. This time it didn’t respond for a moment or two, but before I could give up and try something else text dropped off the wall and I was left with three spells to choose from.

This was manageable and I read all my options. There was a spell called summon minion, one called obsidian skin, and a third called berserker's fury. The last one apparently shut off your fear centers and pain receptors so you could fight without hesitation. I immediately discounted it. Summon minion sounded pretty cool, but I wasn’t sure how much trust you could put into a summoned warrior. I know if some asshole tried to compel me to come bail him out in a fight I’d be tempted to stick a knife in his back. Obsidian skin apparently turned you into a magic sink. Elemental attacks, whatever the hell they were, would be absorbed by the skin and physical damage was mitigated. A little information on the amount of mitigation would have been nice, but I decided to just go with it. The spell cost all 8 points, but I’d already bought the Mana so it seemed dumb to back out now. I pulled the trigger and bought the spell, and it didn’t seem like anything happened. When I thought about it, I just suddenly knew how to cast the spell. Kind of like I just knew how to stand on one leg. Nobody showed me, and I didn’t have to practice, I just kind of waved my hand up the length of my body and said “obsidian skin”. I didn’t feel any different. I tried to do it again and I couldn’t. My hand didn’t move and my mouth wouldn’t say the words. It was creepy as hell and I immediately quit trying. Instead I pulled up my stat screen again.

Health 100 Health Regen .801 Brawn 6 Intelligence 6 Reflexes 8.5 Mana 10 Mana Regen .001

That was weird, but my notification read that I had 87,943XP points left to spend so I tried to focus on why I came to the XP store in the first place. The first thing I pulled up was a Franklin Stove, but it was out of my price range. I pulled up prices on iron pipes, steel drums, copper pipes, anything I could think of to build something of my own. The prices were more reasonable, but I’d learned my lesson on the clothes. I kept looking until I found the cheapest possible work around. Bronze sheet metal blanks were my final choice. They were basically a 2 foot by 4 foot rectangle of metal that had been pounded flat. It wasn’t a uniform thickness, but probably less than a quarter inch at the thickest. I bought 3 of them for 10,000 points. Then I bought myself a sheepskin blanket. The real thing with the smell of lanolin still in the wool, and a shirt made out of something called homespun that I’d never heard of before. It had laces around the neck instead of buttons and the fabric was kind of scratchy but it was a hell of a lot better than continuing to run around without a shirt. I bought two more pairs of socks and a bar of soap to finish off my creature comforts, then pulled up the tool menu. I got a full sized spade instead of an E-tool because my magic bag would let me carry it easily. Then I got a couple of chisels, a bow saw, and a galvanized steel five gallon bucket. That took me down to a couple of hundred XP left, so I took it in tokens and loaded everything but the sheet metal and the shirt into my bag.

I put on the shirt and carried the bronze out the front door. Tim was waiting for me when the loading screen dropped away. He shook his head and stared at me.

“You really ought to save your points up, Jack. There is no telling what we are going to need just to survive.”

“Yeah, but one of the guys who died said you lose all unspent XP. Saving up might not be the smartest choice.”

“Fair enough. What’s with the gold plating?”

“It’s bronze. Cheapest metal in the store. I figure we’ll build our stove from this.”

“This I’ve got to see. I’ll help but I got no clue what you’ve planned here.”

I explained as we worked. First off we laid a log from the fire on top of one of the sheets. Tim stood on the log while I pulled up on the far edge and we managed put a bend more or less straight across the short side. We did it twice until we’d shaped one of the sheets into a kind of wide U that stood up on one side. Tim dug a hole about six inches around while I sharpened one end of a log about the same diameter. We laid another sheet over the hole and took turn slamming the log above the hole until it broke through the bronze sheet. It was metal but it wasn’t too terribly strong. The hardest part was turning the last sheet into a pipe. We basically wrapped it around a log and beat the hell out of it, then burned the log out. We took the pipe and shoved it into the hole in the other sheet, then put the whole thing up on top of the three walls.

It was ugly as hell, and when we went to put it into the lean too it mostly filled one of the little partitioned rooms the others had made. Tim and Angie got into a pretty heated conversation when he wanted to move her partitions around so I bumped over and started helping with the exterior wall. In the end the partitions stayed in place and we’d finished thatching the outside wall. Hunter had already cut some pine to make a bed, and we all gathered round to watch as he piled it up inside the hootch.

“Yes.” He pumped his fist in the air while the rest of us stared at him, and it wasn’t until Jeri called him out for it that he bothered to read the prompt to us. We’d built a rustic tenament, good for accruing one improvement point per night, and as a bonus we already had a single upgrade available. Everybody got excited at that one until he read us the options. We could convert to a weatherproof roof, reinforced walls with windows, or upgrade to a floor other than dirt.

“That’s it, that’s all it says?”

“Dude, I read you the prompt.”

I had monsters on my mind so I immediately popped off. “It’s a no brainer. Let’s get the reinforced walls.”

Unfortunately, Debbie was just as fast with a bid to stay out of the dirt, and Angie seemed to be afraid the game was giving hints of monsoons coming with the weather option. We all argued at cross purposes until Tim let out a piercing whistle.

“Inside voices, guys. I swear its like being back at work. Everybody has valid points. One thing I think we should consider, is there any of those upgrades we could do on our own with a little hard work? Long term, we shouldn’t waste upgrades on stuff we can get another way.”

Hunter shrugged at him.

“We made the wall pretty strong already. I guess we could reinforce it some more, but no way we’re putting in windows.”

Everybody kind of nodded at that, but then Debbie half raised her hand. “Carpet or tile aren’t really in the realm of possibility either. We can probably add thatching or whatever to make it a rainproof roof, but it seems like we’re down to either flooring or windows.”

I interrupted then. “No guarantees it’s going to be glass windows, folks. Lots of places in the world windows are just holes in the wall. Now that I had a chance to think about it, reinforced walls with windows might not be safer than we already got.”

Jeri, who’d agreed with me to begin with, now gave out a “Oh, God. Make up your mind.” Everybody degenerated into a half dozen side arguments again. Tim’s little speech must have done some good, because it stayed pretty low key this time. When it had gone on for a little while, Tim called for a vote. Hunter and Jeri still wanted walls, the rest of us went for flooring. He bitched about it, but Hunter was a stand up guy. He pulled up the interface and made the choice everyone else wanted, even though we couldn’t have really stopped him. The entire structure kind of shook for a second, or at least looked a little blurry like it was shaking. It was completely silent though, and nothing else seemed to happen.

I went inside and the there was a solid gray floor in our place now. I tested it with my boot and then reached down and tried with my bare hand. The thing looked like cement, but felt kind of like rubber. The hard rubber they put down in gym floors, but with a grainy texture to it. Whatever it was, I’d never felt it before. It was just one more unexplainable thing in a whole long list of unexplainable. I decided I’d had enough and turned to the rest of the group.

“I’m gonna rack out. Somebody wake me up when it’s my turn to go on watch.”