The now familiar process of a green screen and having my XP tokens ripped from the messenger bag welcomed me to the XP store. I was hoping I’d gotten a ton of XP based on what everyone else had bought, but when the number rolled up at 1,622,346 XP my jaw dropped. I know I had checked in in a while, and we’d accomplished a lot, but that seemed like way too many points. Excuse me sir, I don’t like the teeth on this gift horse. The thought ran through my head and I chuckled. I chose the character screen and and pulled up my stats

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

With 10 points to spend, my first thought was how long the charge would last on the chainsaws. I dropped a point into mana regen and it rolled up to .101. I wasn’t really sure what that meant but decided it looked better than it had before, so I left it there and put a point into mana, raising it to 15. I put one more into health regen because growing my leg back had been awesome, raising it to .901. I had 7 points left and wasn’t really sure what I should spend them on, so I decided to drop a point into everything. As soon as I made the decision my whole body shook for a second and when I calmed down and looked at the screen again I frowned.

Health 101

Health Regen .911 Brawn 6.5 Intelligence 6.5 Reflexes 9 Mana 20 Mana Regen .201

It took me a second to work out what had happened. Apparently buying health was a one for one, while the rest of it was based on fractions of a point. I made a mental note to check Tim’s little research book and see if he had a better explanation of what all the numbers meant. I could work out how much the numbers moved when I put in a point, but what did that equate to in performance differences? I flipped over to the item screen to see how much XP I had left.

Apparently leveling up had cost me 150,000 XP because I had 1,472,346 left. It still seemed like a lot and I thought about leveling up again, but since each level had been progressively more expensive and there was no price tag on there I held off. John had warned me that livestock was expensive and I decided to focus on that first, work before pleasure. I called up items and got the familiar indecipherable wall of text. I had put a little thought into it beforehand, and I was ready to go with my first filter.

“Sort livestock, capable of reproducing by live cover, domesticated breeds only, sort by price lowest to highest.”

A couple thousand choices were left and I picked the cheapest to look at first. Apparently you could buy a goldfish for only a thousand XP. That was a nice combination of both expensive and utterly worthless. I sighed and added fish to the filter. It thinned out a little and a thought occurred to me. “Also filter out reptiles, amphibians, rodents and insects.” The list shrank down quite a bit until there were only a few hundred left. I sighed and started going through the list. John was right, livestock was expensive.

I ended up buying 3 female and a single male guinea for 25,000 XP a peice. Chickens were only 20,000 so I bought a set of those as well. I decided pigs were too expensive at 250,000 a head, but a 75,000 point goat seemed doable. They were pygmy goats which didn’t sound too great, but was way cheaper than any of the other breeds. I bought one male and two females. I really wanted a horse but the prices on those were astronomical. A donkey was at least possible with the points I had, but I ended up passing on it. I dearly wanted a beast of burden though to take up some of the farm work though. Horses and donkeys were too expensive, so I checked on oxen and mules. In the end I bought one male and one female llama for a total of 500,000. The magic livestock trailer/ cat carrier wasn’t full yet, but I figured it was as close as I was going to get it.

After buying the animals my XP had dropped down to 567,346 which was still respectable but didn’t seem like the huge windfall it had been before I started shopping. I tried buying the place I had been building but it didn’t show up. I guess I hadn’t finished enough of it to register with the system yet. I had spent hours considering what to buy when I finally got back here, and now I wasn’t sure where to start. Thinking back on how much it sucked to lose a leg and knowing we’d bump into the t-rexes again, I made a decision. I bought myself some armor for 127,000. It looked like a pair of shin guards like a baseball catcher would wear, and a kind of flak vest looking thing that was open on the sides. The material was something called reinforced organics that sounded kind of like carbon fiber and according to the menu was cut proof and puncture resistant. After I bought it and had a chance to check it out in person it felt a lot like plastic but with a weird brownish color and the straps were definitely leather. I’d feel weird wearing it around town so I put it all into my messenger bag after trying it on.

I pulled up the menu for power tools next, and again there was a shit ton of options. My choices seemed to be split between the regular kind of stuff like you could get at the big box stores back home and mana powered magical equivalents. There was a huge price difference between the two and I decided to investigate getting electricity at my place. There were windmills, solar panels, alcohol fueled generators and even hand crank dynamos available. I knew the choice could make or break me so I went through everything and ended up with something unexpected.. I found something that was a cross between a solar panel and a mana crystal billed as an electrical charging station. It had to have access to sunlight, but it could charge a battery and supply power to a single electrical outlet apparently indefinitely. The cost was 250,000XP which seemed high until you considered the difference in price on the magical versus electric power tools.

I had 190,346 XP left when I pulled back up the power tools. I picked up a worklight on a stand, some c-clamps, a gallon jug of wood glue, a drill, reciprocating saw, circular saw, and a plunge cut router,. The total was 76, 280XP, and I bought an assortment of bits and blades for all of them plus some pliers, a framing hammer and two big ass buckets of nails to bring the total to an even 90,000 XP. It left me with a little over a hundred thousand XP to spend and I’d bought all of what I considered the necessaries.

It was time for some luxury items. Soap, more toilet paper, and toothpaste were first up on my list. It was a funny definition for luxury. Then I bought a real pillow, another pair of jeans in case the leather ones didn’t work out, and a pillow. They’d all been relatively cheap compared to the expenses from earlier, so I kept going. There was an assorted box of candy bars that I picked up, along with a 10 pound bag of potatoes, a big plastic pail full of pancake mix, and a 5 pound bag of macaroni noodles. I was tired of my no carb diet and I wanted some options while we waited for the farm to pick back up. I also bought a 50 pound bag of salt in case nobody else remembered to grab any. I had a couple of projects in mind for when we got back to the keep so I picked up a 4 foot piece of rebar, and some plastic sheeting that was thin but felt pretty sturdy, None of it had been real expensive, but all together it had taken a big chunk out of that 100, 000 and I only had 27,032 left.

I tried to think of anything else I’d missed but I was drawing a blank until I thought of dragging all the stuff in front of the keep’s door before we left. Locks, hinges, and assorted hardware were all beyond the tech level we were capable of producing so far. I pulled up the sort feature to see how much of it I could afford with the points I had left. Judging from the prices I should have shopped smarter and hit this up before I went for my luxury items. I ended up buying three door knobs with the lock built into them. They weren’t modern knobs but big old fashioned heavy things with one of those big round skeleton keys like I’d seen on TV. They looked sturdy as hell, although I imagine someone who could pick locks wouldn’t have much trouble with them. Each came with two keys, and when I checked, they weren’t interchangeable. I bought 10 more keys for one of them I’d already mentally designated as for the keep, but left it at 2 each on the others. It burned me down to only 10,281XP left and I decided to take that in tokens. I couldn’t really think of anything else and I wanted some cushion in case something else came up.

I was glad I’d dumped all the skins and stuff I’d built up in my messenger bag, because I didn’t have any spare slots available once I was done shopping. I made a mental note to unload all but the essentials once I got back to my place. Right now I was definitely all eggs in one basket. If something happened to me and one of my friends didn’t recover the messenger bag, I was screwed. I exited the XP store and headed back to the market area. Now that basically everything I owned was strapped to my shoulder I could understand John’s semi-paranoid attitude from earlier. If they knew I was carrying all this stuff I had to be an unbearable temptation to a mugger. When I made it back, even though I’d probably only been gone a little while thanks to the time dilation in the XP store, everybody but Sheryl, Debbie, and Allison were gone.

“What’s up? I scare everyone off or something?”

Debbie stood up and walked around the pottery to me. “Take a walk with me, Jack. Allison, you mind watching my wagon?”

“No problem.”

I followed Debbie back towards the center of the village and she reached out and took my arm so I was escorting her like a proper gentleman. “Hunter and Jeri ran into some friends from before and they went to have dinner with them. They’ll meet us at the river when it starts to get dark. Allison loaned Kenny some kind of cleaver saw looking thing and he, Sam, and Helen went to start building themselves a canoe. Kenny says he’s built one before back in the real world. John and Steve went along. I think John was curious to how it would work, and Steve just follows him everywhere.”

“Sounds good to me. What are we up to?”

“Sheryl said there were several people who’ve opened up mini-restaurants in the evening. Apparently it’s cheaper to cook for groups than individuals and the prices are supposed to be quite reasonable. I hoped you saved some XP tokens, Jack, because you’re taking me out to dinner.”