Goodie needed a new plan.

He knew he was obsessing over it, but everything he had read about and seen on TV agreed that when shit hit the fan, you needed a plan, a goal, a timeline, a deadline…okay, maybe he could do without anything with the word dead in it but basically, he needed something to keep him moving, even if it was in the wrong direction. Otherwise, he would just end up burying himself in his bed, trying to sleep away his problems.

Like he was doing now.

He forced himself to get up. He was just in the sitting position but was still better than lying down.

He tried to think of a new plan.

The problem was, he had already emptied his brain trying to come up with the first plan. So, what the hell was he gonna do?

The only thing he knew anything about was games and while there was an RPG aspect to this whole stupid mess, he doubted that half a lifetime of left-clicking would help him out of it.

Could games help him? Not likely. Maybe he could introduce some mechanic from another type of game into the [SYSTEM], logically speaking, if one person from earth made the it, then another person, like him, could change it.

He rolled his eyes. Introducing a new mechanic! He didn’t even understand how actual mechanics worked, yet he wanted to change a spiritual-based, pseudo-god like program that was hundreds of years old? He really was an idiot.

But maybe there was something useful he could learn from his knowledge of other games, But what?

What did he know?

What…did…he…know?

“Whaaaaaat?” he droned out.

Survival would be the most obvious. Collecting food and materials for crafting. Adventure games would take that further by having grabbing anything that wasn’t nailed down but he suspected that becoming a hoarder wasn’t the answer to his problems.

Fighting games. He’d be insta K.O.d within seconds.

First-person shooter? He didn’t have any guns, or a heads-up display. Guns might have been useful but more likely they would have been made redundant by magic. He had no clue as to how he would go about getting a HUD.

Third-person shooter? Well, that would pretty much have the same person as a first-person shooter. So, another dead end. Actually…no…well? The ability to see around corners would be useful but how would he do that? His link with her Majesty could let him see through her eyes but he would need her to act as a scout instead of an attacker. If he could get a decent second summon then maybe?

He wrote down ‘See around corners’ under the headline ‘strategy’.

“What else?”

Strategy! Strategy was important with everything but…how would he apply that. Tower defence generally required some towers and probably some way to build said towers…so needed to figure out how to 4x in real life. Other than that, it was usually just about numbers and variety of units.

App games…useless, same with rhythm and dancing games. Sports games? He could probably open a small stadium somewhere and make some money that way; the guys who owned sports teams all seemed to be rich.

“Nah.” He would just fall back to the same problem of how to keep it all.

There were a number of sims but the most relevant would be the political simulations.

He sighed as he thought about politics. He really hated politics.

He took a moment to dredge up every memory of games with or about politics. He was soon mentally mired in a sea of bullshit. Not just from games, from everything, moves, books, cartoons, and comics. Even music. An entire world’s worth of bullshit. And that wasn’t including real-life politics, which he would not be thinking about at all. He was already miserable; he didn’t need to be angry as well.

Politics.

Boiled down, all it was that you would have a faction with a leader. But in the background would always be other leaders. The real boss ruling from the shadows, or a wannabe leader or something along those lines.

He began to scribble as he thought.

There would also be enforcers. Not necessarily goons to rough people up, but the type who would ensure that the party’s message would be advertised…aggressively. The kind of people that believed the ends justified the means and would resort to any sort of behaviour to get their way. Narcissists and sadists. He had met plenty of them in his short life. People high own their own ego.

That last bit had him on a train of thought that had him heading straight to rage town. He shook his head, then tried to get back to what was important.

He would need to find out the faction’s goals. There would always be more than one. Official and unofficial. Also, knowing the basic needs and wants of the members would help him gain some influence. Or not. He knew full well, that unlike games, people would and could take everything you had and still not acknowledge your existence, let alone help you in any way.

Then, of course, he had to find out about the party’s enemies. He had to know who he was pissing-off by associating with the wrong crowd.

What else was there?

“Wutwutwut…what else?” he repeated to himself as a kind of mantra as he scoured his brain for more ideas.

There were management games. But that required him to be in charge of something, to be in a position that people would listen to him. An unlikely event, especially given his history of being the easiest to bully.

Could he manage something on the waggon train? supplies or storage or something?

He thought about it for a while.

He knew more about management games than most others as it spoke to his character type. Power and control, even the illusion of it, appealed to him for the same reason it appealed to most people because it was never his to have.

He had done some basic research on the matter when he had gotten it into his head that he would one day go into game design. He found an article while trawling the internet for free lessons on building management games. The thirteen categories…or was it elements? The thirteen ‘something’ of management games.

But how would he apply them? If he could apply them?

Engineering was the first category. The building of big unmoving things. Infrastructure, buildings, etc… the factories built the nails, but engineering built the factories. Broken down, it meant to symbolise the manipulation of one’s surroundings…or something like that. All that reading and he never learnt a thing, he thought as he scratched his nose.

How would that apply to the waggon train? Buildings were mainly for city-building games, in others, it could be installing, maintaining, and repairing machines. The technology was primitive but weren’t waggons a kind of machine? Probably not. He’d ask Eric tomorrow about construction jobs but he doubted there would be anything for someone with nearly no upper body strength. Digging was a big part of construction, maybe he could use his shadow demons to make holes? Not Her Majesty obviously but his next summons perhaps?

Resources followed next; farming, fishing, and mining. If you got from land, sea, or sky, you got resources. Could he mine while on the move? Could he mine period? He remembered that miners would use canaries as an early warning system for detecting poison gas. He wasn’t sure he would comfortable with that. People were one thing, but being cruel to animals wasn’t right.

After a moment, he couldn’t help noting that mining would also involved digging. Something to think about.

There was a similar time constraint to fishing but he could make a large net, then drag it across a river. That would grab a fish or two, he was sure. Or maybe he could use Her Majesty to bite them, but that would require her to swim and he wasn’t sure if she could drown. It occurred to him that he didn’t know if she could swim or not.

“Can you swim?” he directed the question to Her Majesty, who responded by continuing to sleep.

That only left farming. He had seen mobile gardens before, on carts, roofs of mobile homes, even self-contained ones kept in carboys. Get up on his roof each day was unlikely but there was a skylight. If that didn’t work, he could always tie pots to the side of his truck-waggon, see how that worked out. He would need rope for that. A lot of rope. Wasn’t rope expensive in the dark ages? He remembered some history buffs online always getting pissed off when they saw a robin hood movie where some guy would cut a rope to launch a catapult or drop one of those huge hanging candle holders onto a group of soldiers. Apparently, rope was hard to make.

Now, what would he grow?

He had no knowledge of the local flora, or was it fauna? For a moment he became stuck in a mental loop; fauna and flora spinning across his mental landscape, a growing storm of confusion threatening to overwhelm his very being. To be snuffed out by a cliché.

He needed to learn herbalism.

Somehow, he doubted it would be as easy to learn as it was in manga, especially if herbalism lead to potion-making like it usually did in the stories. It would probably cost him an arm and a leg to learn, if he was allowed to learn it at all. Even if the secrets of herbs and spices weren’t zealously guarded by merchants and power mongers, he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the shed despite his ‘above average’ intelligence.

Throughout his life, he had been told by various experts that his intelligence was above average. As far as he could tell, the classification only gave him the ability to understand two things, the average person was an idiot; and ‘above average’ still had the word average in it. Still, those experts had helped him when his aunt tried to have them diagnose him with retardation. And again, when she tried to have them say he was autistic. …and again, when his school tried to transfer him out for supposedly having a learning disability, something they had discovered shortly after he had told them that he was an atheist, but he was sure those two things were unrelated.

He lay still for a while. The thought of the number of arseholes he had to deal with in his life…it was too much, just too much.

“Ugh, what am I thinking? I just need tomatoes and stuff.” Surely some of the local merchants would have seeds he could buy. Or maybe he could just bury the vegetables themselves. He was sure he saw a video about dumping slices of tomato in a bucket and the rest would take care of itself. Oh…wait, someone once told him that fruit and vegetables sterilised to prevent people from growing them at home. Of course, that was on Earth, and he didn’t think that the local produce would be genetically modified.

Oh, but if he grew stuff it would take time and if it was on the outside of the truck it would be stolen. He tried to figure out a way around that, when he couldn’t, he tried to figure out if there was some type of anti-theft he could employ. Nope, gardening was going to have to be a long-term project. Which didn’t help him now.

“Okay…so resources, complicated.”