Pale light filters in from… somewhere? I blink at the hazy collection of shapes surrounding me, rendered grey in the diffuse gloom. Boxes? Dad’s medical supplies?

No. I’m slumped against the castle floor. My hopes crash. This marks the second time I’ve passed out since logging in; a phenomenon that’s no more appealing for repetition.

It takes a minute to lever myself into a sitting position. Every part of me protests with sharp aches and pains. My knee throbs, I can barely put weight on my shoulder, and my head is pounding.

Now that I’m paying attention, I look down at my naked avatar—at my body, or what feels increasingly, horrifically like my own body—and wrinkle my nose at the thick smears of blood, mud, and who knows what else covering every inch of me. I am a mess, and I’ve made a mess of the floor beneath me.

Not that it matters, much. The dimly lit shapes resolve into a ransacked room.

A gargantuan bed frame, likely meant to hold all the NPCs I saw in the yard, lays broken in a corner. Its straw mattress was cut open, the innards yanked free and strewn about the room. A few homemade stools and chairs are tossed around, legs and backs broken. The table lists toward one corner, and cutlery lies scattered across the floor.

I push myself to my feet and stumble over to the bed. Though partially gutted, it still makes a warmer, softer place to lay. No sooner does my head hit it, am I out again.

The second—third?—time I wake, it’s with more clarity and a lot more light. There’s warm straw beneath me, and while the rest of me is chilled, I’m not shivering my bones straight out of my body. A mild improvement.

A more dubious improvement is that I fully remember where I am, why I’m naked, and why my stomach is collapsing in on itself. I groan, curling back into the straw to ride out a wave of nausea and pain.

My life has been a fairly lucky one. I’ve always had a roof over my head, clothes on my back, etcetera. Sure, I’ve gone a full day without eating before, but always by choice when I was a teenager who occasionally decided starving herself was the only way she’d ever be “pretty.” Since realizing it would never work, I hadn’t willingly gone without three meals a day; minimum. Until now.

The nausea slackens by degrees, enough that I’m able to climb from bed and take a better look at my surroundings.

Last night’s estimations prove well founded: someone went through here like a tornado. It’ll take a closer inspection to find anything worth salvaging, but I doubt there’s much. If it had immediate value, it’s gone.

Still, I’ve lucked out. Finding this farm is an act of kindness large enough I should fall to my knees thanking the stars or gods or game devs; whoever is responsible for the windfall. If I can fix the gate—hell, even if I can’t—a castle provides shelter from the most immediate threat next to dehydration and starvation: demons.

I grip my stomach as another wave of gurgling hunger wracks my body. My avatar, I mean. It’s alarming how fast the distinction is blurring. This place is so real, so vivid, that I’m having trouble remembering what my real bed, my real body, my real world feel like.

Or maybe that’s the pain and hunger talking.

“A list,” I tell myself, and startle at the sound of my voice in the quiet. I’m not whispering and in the abject silence my voice is loud as an earthquake.

“I need to make a list,” I repeat, testing the way the words sound. My voice is scratchy, like I’d expect it to be after a day of screaming, crying, and nothing to drink. Talking makes my throat hurt even more, but somehow, hearing the words out loud make them more actionable than they are in my head.

“Priorities. First: Safety. Figure out what happened to the demon. Kill the mobs. Second: find water. This is a farm, it should have a well. Three: fix the gate. Four…”

Those are out of order.

“No. Three: sort out supplies to work with. Which might need to come before safety? Otherwise, how do I... Ugh. Okay, okay, okay, Alexa, think.”

As I talk, I pace slowly along a clear section of the room. “Take stock. Find water. Consider options.”

The well should be outside, which makes the demon my biggest concern. Judging by the light, it should be late enough in the morning for the demon to have reverted to its more mundane form.

Quietly, I approach the exterior door and crack it open. A familiar, strangely happy sound greets me alongside an olfactory slap of rot. Swallowing thickly against the acid clawing up my throat, I pull the door open wide enough to peek outside.

The bridge I’d propped up last night is still there, shielding me from view of the main gate as I ease my head through the gap. At first, I can’t see anything, either—just the too-wide-to-jump gap between the balcony and stairs to my right. Then, near the base of the castle, within that open gap, a wild sow noses her way into view.

She’s a hefty thing; big-boned and walnut brown with heavy, sagging tits. It’s hard to tell at this angle, but she might be chest height to my avatar; larger than anything I could deal with one-on-one in my present state, and that’s ignoring the clear sounds of a herd just out of sight.

Still, I relax. They can’t get up here. I step out onto the balcony and peer around the edge of the bridge to see the rest.

“...Three, four, five…” Six, including the mother beneath me. Four of them look young enough to still be nursing, if their sizes are any indication. It’s the boar who catches my attention. He’s at least a head taller than the sow, with huge yellow tusks. That one took out the gate; I have no doubt.

They mill aimlessly around the front yard, stepping over and through the mangled corpses. It’s clear, both from the stains on their pelts and the state of the bodies, that the demons ate their fill last night.

“At least they’re full,” I mutter.

The boar’s head shoots up, turning in my direction as its snout twitches. Its tail flicks. One juvenile ventures closer to my position, snout twitching just like its father, followed quickly by a second and third.

A sudden grunt from the sow sends all six fleeing for the ruined gate.

They’re running...from me? I almost can’t believe it; wild boar are always aggressive in daylight. They should have growled, or charged the castle or… something. Right?

At the gate, the sow stops. She turns back to look at me as though considering that I haven’t given chase.

This is my chance to get rid of them. Much as keeping pigs, however wild, might be a good idea for food later, they’re just going to turn into demons come dusk. It isn’t worth the risk.

The sow takes a step back inside.

“Go on! Get out of here!” I yell.

With an affronted grunt, the sow bolts after the rest of her family, leaving me alone once again.

“How’s that for step one?” I ask the air, feeling a faint sense of victory despite having done nothing noteworthy. Earned or not, this is a victory. I have shelter and space to work; possibly more. Sparing a glance at the sky, I note that it isn’t even noon yet. There’s plenty of time to inspect the castle holdings and whatever the looters may have left behind.

There isn’t a well.

It seems an unbelievable oversight on the game developers’ part. Who would build a castle, or a farm, without a defensible water source? But I scoured the yard and both outbuildings, turning up nothing.

My throat is parched. Swallowing will be an issue soon, if the unrelenting realism of this world is any indication. Swallowing and talking, and somewhere in there my ability to reason. Beyond that, I’m not sure what dying by dehydration looks like. Neither do I care to find out.

Vaguely, I recall an old survival movie where the characters had to drink their own piss to stay hydrated. I really hope it doesn’t come to that, even as I squat inside the dank, unholy smelling outhouse I found near the back wall. How is this fair? I shouldn’t have to pee; I haven’t had anything to drink!

There’s no way to wash my hands after, and nothing that looks remotely like toilet paper is in evidence. Feeling unbelievably disgusting, I let the lingering droplets of piss join what’s already dried to my skin from yesterday’s embarrassment, and walk stiffly back to the front yard. At least I didn’t have to poop, though I suspect that’ll come, eventually. It’s an effort not to shudder.

The desiccated corpses littering the bailey have almost become commonplace. For a long minute I stare at them, waiting until the rumblings of nausea settle. And they do, until I consider what needs to happen next.

I have to move them. It isn’t good to leave them here, for a variety of reasons, but the mere idea of touching them is one step too far. Flies continue to writhe over the remaining flesh, interspersed with wiggling points of white. Maggots.

Aren’t they a good source of protein? My stomache dry heaves. I turn away, heading for the gate.

By some small miracle, the gate hinges are holding on by the barest of degrees, along with a tenth of splintered wood. The rest forms a scattered, dangerous pile strewn for several feet inside the yard. You can’t fix this in the real world. In a game, however, it depends on the crafting system.

I speculated before that crafting is more realistic now than in the alphas. It’s still a decent hypothesis. But a defeatist outlook doesn’t give me any idea where to start. Better to go with what I know.

Tentatively, I pick up a large but manageable chunk of wood. A grey text-box appears, hovering over it.

— —

Scrap Wood

Type: Oak, Treated

Quantity: 2.34 lbs

Durability: Low

— —

I pick up a second, smaller piece and am treated to a similar pop-up; only the quantity has changed. Though I wait for a second, nothing else happens. I sigh.

In the alpha there was a quick menu for combining material scraps on the fly. It only applied to basic mats like sticks or straw, or broken pieces of wood, but that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Figures. Hell, it even makes a twisted sort of sense. MANIK PIX-E had only agreed to include quick crafting after we’d spent months campaigning, begging, and modding it in ourselves. They kept arguing it wasn’t “realistic.” In the end, quality of life won out.

Until now. I swallow back my annoyance. That isn’t helpful right now.

The less convenient method requires a workbench which I may actually have.

When I’d gone through the place earlier, I’d focused on finding water. I’d given little thought to the rest of the outbuildings’ contents. One of them looked like a work room. That makes sense. After all, a farm needs to make and repair their own equipment; especially one this remote.

I survey the two outbuildings set across the bailey from one another. They’re both in fine condition despite spending the night in demonic presence. They’re also more-or-less identical; wood and plaster constructs in an advanced, square-frame style. A style that’s anachronistic as all hell juxtaposed with the castle, but that’s never seemed to matter to the dev’s sense of “realism.” Each building also boasts a wooden door hung on rope hinges, and more rope looped around wooden latches serving as both doorknob and lock.

One of them holds building and farm supplies. The other had barracks on one end, and a stable on the other. I don’t remember which is which.

Cradling the wood in one arm, I gather the largest sections of wood as I make my way toward the nearest building. Each piece comes with its own text box, briefly explaining the weight and quality of said piece. A few, those with fittings or nails in evidence, bring up multiple boxes; one for each component.

This could get annoying quickly. What happens if I’m being chased by something or—God forbid—have to fight something? Will I have pop-ups suddenly littering my vision like a poorly monetized free-to-play?

By the time I reach the building, I’ve got enough in my arms to make pulling the door open difficult. I get it started, then nudge it the rest of the way with one heel. The door bangs against my hip as I step inside, and stop on the threshold.

It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to the interior’s relative gloom. There’s light in here, though it’s filtered through wax-papered windows set close to the ceiling. As the dark shapes resolve into a single, rectangular room with a straw-covered floor, cut crossways by a furrow leading out the door. Something was drug outside. A body, judging by the reddish-brown stains

There’s a similar stain on the edge of the workbench. Whoever died in here—whatever; NPCs are whats—they clearly put up a fight. There are more rusty red flecks in various places around the room, and they left a few boxes of precious scrap strewn about.

Swallowing down my uneasy heart, I carry my burden to the workbench.

Immediately, a glittering, glowing panel pops into existence, hovering over the back of the bench like a whiteboard. Relief, pure and intense, floods through my veins. Despite the pop-ups I’d been seeing, I’d half expected the workbench wouldn’t work either. I take a deep, shuddering breath and will back the tears threatening to spill. There’s no time for that. Besides, I’ve done more than enough crying.

The panel is as long as the workbench with a headline stating the obvious: “Common Workbench.” One item is listed in the left-hand column, but there’s so much room beneath that I’m sure more options will become available later; I probably just need some kind of tool to populate them.

I press “extract.” It blinks pale blue, then white. A prompt appears.

“Extract and sort raw materials? Yes / No?”

“Yes,” I say on impulse, and the selection highlights itself before the panel winks out of existence.

Particle lights erupt around the scrap like an explosion of fireflies. They twinkle; starting dim and increasing in brightness until there’s a pop of blinding light. Flinching, I resist the urge to rub my eyes—my hands are disgusting—and blink rapidly. When I can see again, I find a pile of fresh, perfect-looking materials laid neatly out on the workbench.

“Woah,” I breathe as I pick up a brass nail from the small pile. It’s wickedly sharp, and about as long as my finger. About as thick, too. What’s more interesting is that it looks handmade, down to little knicks and scratches from a hammer. Upon inspecting the others, I find that each of them is unique. Another uneasy tremor works its way through me. How many models can a game have?

Glancing back at the “extract” selection, finding the text has turned light grey and italicized; the universal signal for “not available." Beneath that is a new option: craft.

Eagerly, I press it and am disappointed when the right-hand column flickers but remains blank. What?

As though in response, tiny grey text scrolls into existence at the bottom of the panel.

“Quick crafting recipes become available when the following requirements are met: user has learned or created a recipe, user has created and assigned a material storage facility within the workbench compound, user has stored or is carrying appropriate crafting tools.”

It’s disappointing news, if entirely expected. MANIK-PIXIE couldn’t make this easy, could they? But one item stands out.

“We can create our own recipes?”

To my surprise, the text wipes clear and begins again.

“Users are encouraged to use their imaginations. Anything that can be done in your old home can be done here, given the right materials and equipment.”

So I wasn’t wrong, but being right is a cold comfort. And then it’s just cold. Ice cold. My blood freezes with it as my mind locks on that peculiar phrasing.

“Anything that can be done in your old home.”

That can’t be right. I cannot be right. In a small voice, small enough I barely recognize it, I ask, “How do I log out?”

The text box wipes clean. Pauses.

“Question not understood.”

“Like hell. How. Do. I. Log. Out?”

“Question not understood.”

Tangling my fingers into the thick, impossible hair of my avatar, I flail for any logic that might explain this. There’s no logout button. I can’t find an escape menu of any kind. This world is too real, too concrete for its own good and the workbench seems to think this is my home now?!

I’m know I’m overreacting, but after everything else that’s happened in the past—what? Less than twenty-four hours in game but it feels like a lifetime; after all of that this is just…

This is just…

This is an overreaction. Calm the fuck down, Lex.

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and count backwards from ten as I slowly release. It’s a little silly, but the process forces me to stop reacting and rationalize.

“It’s just a workbench. Some dev wrote that in without giving it much thought. No one knew there’d be a glitch of this magnitude. Besides, why would a workbench have a tooltip for logging out?”

I open my eyes, refocusing on the workbench, and scream.

“I apologize for distressing you, MSWYVERN.”