As I slowly pull myself into the doorway of the room, I hear a rustling sound and see Charlie with half her body inside a huge chest. She’s already thrown a few things out, including what looks like a packet of beef jerky and a short dagger.

“Oooh this will be very useful right now.” As Charlie says so, she falls out of the chest, holding a bottle with some red liquid sloshing around inside it.

“It’s a health potion which you desperately need, come over here and take it. I also can’t believe that you’re making it over here looking like that, you must be in a lot of pain right now. I can genuinely say good job on that even though you got us into this mess in the first place.”

Pain? Wait, why am I not actually feeling any pain right now? Ah, it must be due to the paralysis effect, in this case it probably worked against the spiders as I definitely would have been distracted by that otherwise.

Charlie comes over and hands me the potion. As soon as I grab a hold of it,

Health Potion: Low Quality

pops into my vision.

“How should I use this? Should I drink it or pour it over my wounds or what exactly?”

“Pour a little on the biggest bite areas and then drink the rest. There’s still two more in here, so I’ll take one of the others now and we can save the third.”

I do as she suggests and I watch my wounds slowly close up while my health ticks back up to full. The paralysis effect also went from medium down to low. I’m able to slowly pick myself up even though my legs feel like dead weights at the moment. I make my way carefully over to the chest to see what else is inside.

As we ruffle through, we find a lot more jerky, a rusty sword, an ingot of some unidentified metal, 10 arrows, and an old zippo lighter.

Not everything is useful to us, but luckily, we have just the place to store all of it!

We decide to bring it out to the truck first before we clear the rest of the house while waiting for my paralysis to go away entirely.

Over the next hour or so, we are able to finish clearing out the house we had already started on as well as the next house over. There weren’t any other big surprises in store for us and I made sure to follow Charlie’s lead the entire time. There was another scorpion/spider-like creature in the next house over and this time I got to see clearly how Charlie fought it.

She was able to nimbly dodge each of its strikes and hit neatly into the joints of its chitin. At one point, it looked like she was going to get skewered by the tail, she suddenly shifted into a pigeon to dodge and fly right above, momentarily resting in its blindspot. At this point, she turned into the exact creature she was fighting. Falling down behind it, she grabs it with her own pair of claws and repeatedly stabs it with her scorpion tail. It was quite a sight to behold.

The rest of the loot we obtained isn’t really worth mentioning other than a few more ingots of that mysterious metal, plenty more arrows, and three mana potions that were in the same room as the second scorpion monster. Throughout all of this, I was able to advance to level 6 while Charlie was able to get up to level 7. My stat page now looks like this.

David "Golden Beaver" Wilson Team: White Level 6 Health 300/300 Stamina 100/100 Mana 235/500 Vitality 30 Endurance 10 Wisdom 50 Strength 15 Agility 10 Intelligence 10 Free Stat Points 0 Free Ability Points 0

I’m now trying to decide on what to spend my ability point on: active, passive, or item. I don’t think I’ll go with active, I already have too many things I want to spend my mana on. I haven’t used my truck much yet but my active ability involving it is already what I’d consider most useful. I’ll go with another ability for my truck. Oh yeah, don’t I also have 50 stat points for my truck to use? I should use those as well.

New ability unlocked! Item (active): One Unit: Your truck is all one connected unit. Freely teleport from the bed of your truck to the cabin at will. Costs no mana to use it yourself but 25 to teleport someone with you.

That’ll be really useful! If I’m up front, I can summon something in the back and easily go and grab it now before I teleport myself back to the cabin. Now to distribute those stat points for the truck. Everything looks useful, so I think a nice even spread will be useful. I’m not too sure what intelligence does though, I’ll put ten points in everything other than that for now.

Unnamed Truck Owner: David Max Speed 85 mp/h Acceleration 2.5 ft/s2 Toughness 150 Fuel Efficiency 12 mpg Maneuverability 20 Intelligence 5

These stats seem to work differently than my normal ones. For each point I get a different value: 1:5 for toughness, 1:1 for Max Speed and Maneuverability, 1:0.5 for mpg, and 1:0.1 is acceleration. I suppose that makes sense from a balance perspective, no complaints from me.

As I finish off adjusting my stats, we make it back to the truck with the last load of stuff (mostly jerky) from the second house. The sun is now setting, so we decided to call it a night. First thing I do is hop into the bed and try teleporting myself to the front, and *poof* just like that, I’m standing in the back of the front cabin. *poof* and I’m back inside the trailer bed. That is seriously cool.

I see Charlie sitting on the bed of the truck chewing on some jerky, so I move to join her. I also use some of my mana to summon something to give to her.

“To apologize for almost getting both of us killed earlier, here is the whiskey that you ordered. I also made some cookies for us to share as well, so we don’t only have to eat this tough meat.”

“Fucking finally. Also, don’t worry about that shit from earlier, I’m not one to hold grudges. You learned your lesson by following me the rest of the day, so with this whiskey, it’s already water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned.”

“Wow, thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to lead me and help me when you could probably have done all this yourself and taken all the xp for it.”

“You’re probably right, but I’ve already learned the hard way that it’s better to be a part of a team to cover each other’s weaknesses. Alright, enough chit chat, the sun is almost down and I don’t want to be out in the open for whatever happens at night. Let’s move on over to the cabin and figure out our game plan for tonight.”

She’s right about that, I do not want to be caught out here at night. Who knows what could happen?