The next morning, I awoke slowly, from a deep, heavy sleep. I sat up and put my back to the altar under the large oak tree, from which I’m made my weapons. And rubbed the sleep out of my head. I looked at the shadows and realized it was afternoon.

“Yesterday look a lot more out of me than I thought.” I tried to review everything that had happened the day before, and winced. How perfectly crystal clear my mind was this morning told me how truly disabled my faculties had been the day before. I was lucky I didn’t get us both killed trying to hunt while in that state. Thank god the lizards were noob easy from that blind and didn’t bum rush us when that big on at the end came.

I walked over to the bend in the river, and washed my face, then when the waters had cleared I looked at my reflection and my body, and got a real feel for the changes. I looked like I did in my mid to late 20s. My hair and beard a brown so dark, it was almost black. I was as the skinniest I’d even been as an adult around 190lbs, but I was carrying way more muscle than I had that one semester in college where I maintained that weight. I hopped up and ran through some of the Tang Soo Do and Karate forms I’d learned when I took classes. Then I went through some of the drills and forms we’d developed from SCA Fighting. Then I thought about the WMA stuff I’d learned from books and videos, but never really used, and my memories of it was perfect. The forms crystal clear. I grabbed my staff, and performed a few oberhau’s and took off into some of the staff fighting plays my hands in the stupid looking thumb both in position that Western staff styles prefer, and for good reason. I wasn’t as smooth as I’d been at the stuff I’d practiced diligently, but I could feel myself getting better, smoother, cleaner at a rate that was fairly astonishing. I worked on getting the timing right, starting my blows the instant before my body movements, and when I hit the sweet spot, it just clicked, like I’d been doing it forever. I’d always been good at this part of learning, building muscle memory, but never like this. It usually took me hundreds of repetitions to start getting the kinks smoothed out of a new style.

I concentrated on my interface thinking about the problem and my character sheet popped up. Then I expanding out of the perk “Kinesthesia” till it was a popup with the info I needed. “The power of non leveled abilities like Kinesthesia, are calculated by multiplying it by your level of 3, to find their total effect on your abilities.”

“When we get out of the sudden death zone of low levels, I’m really going to have to dig into this adaptive interface, there is some real power here.”

Yamina zoomed up, twinkling brightly in the afternoon shadows beneath the great oak, obviously fully refreshed from yesterday too. “Hi Bill, glad to see you are fully awake.”

I cast ID on Yamina,

I looked up at her brightly, “Hey Firefly, what have you been up to while I did my sleeping beauty impersonation?”

Yamina put her hands on her hips and eyed me critically. “Bill, while you look far better than you did yesterday, clearly I’m the beauty of this pairing.” She said preening sarcastically. Then she continued “I thought a lot about yesterday, and what we’d done, and what we’d left undone. I bought Automap, and the Cartographer skill, which lets me share maps I make with others. Then I explored this grove in detail, mapping it.”

“Wow” I said, “Great job thinking ahead Yamina, I’ll need to put Cartographer on my list as well. Can you share the map with me?”

“It happens automatically, since we’re in a party, the System is clever like that. Pull up your big map”

I mentally clicked on my mini map and a full screen version popped up, with plenty of opacity to see, and just enough removed to tell what was going on behind. I saw a much larger area than we’d covered in the grove before with a spit wandering off to the lizards. I mentally zoomed in on where we were standing now. Max zoom, I was about an inch tall, but I could clearly see Yamina once I got close enough for the blue dot to pop away. Then I played with it zooming in an out scrolling around and trying to rapidly familiarize myself with the grove, and the areas immediately around it. Leaning in to get an even closer look.

“This is incredible Yamina, excellent job Point to you. 4-0”

Yamina’s light grew and she straightened proudly. “Victory is Mine!”

I straightened and continued, “Looks like your mom really did hook us up, I see that bar of Black sand, and a large outcropping of quartz bearing rocks, and we’re backed up to a line of cliffs with veins of quartz as well.. Which then leads to the foothills of the mountains where the nearby river originates, up on some kind of plateau, that’s a little weird. Looks like the grove covers about 5 acres all told. If some of those trees farthest from the river are not fruit bearing, I’d be very surprised. Downstream there appears to be some Pecans as well, edible nuts and wood nearly identical to hickory.”

Yamins tilted her head and look at me her eyebrows pinching together, “Why is black sand so important isn’t It just sand?”

“Black sand is probably Magnetite, one of the richest Iron ores around, combined with quartz, that means we’re almost certainly near gold country as well maybe even silver and copper. That river probably has some metal in it too. Maybe nuggets, or maybe just fines, but it’s almost certain some is there. It’d be a huge deal of work to take real advantage of that, but I’m not past panning it up, and those resources combined with my Shaping magic, we should be able to harvest and convert those resources on a small scale quite easily.”

I noticed my messages icon was flashing and went to take a look. “Let me dig through my messages a moment.”

Lots and lots of messages. I concentrated on making a tab for each of the kinds of messages I could think of. Then I had a thought.

I turned to Yamina who was flying lazily about the branches of the tree, “Yamina, since our maps are linked, could you fly up as high as you are comfortable, and do a big circle along the edge of the grove, I’ll give us a low detail map over a large area. Don’t leave the grove though, there have to be flying beasts around, and you’re perfectly snack sized for even the smallest.”

“Hey!”, she stomped her foot in the air somehow, “I’m 3 times bigger than I was yesterday, and you didn’t even notice! I’m not bite sized!”

Oh crap, she was, I’d basically done the fairy equivalent of missing my wife’s new hairdo.. time for damage control, eyes sharp for everything new.

“Oh wow, Yamina, you sure did, and you look great!, you put on muscle , and your hair, is it longer too isn’t it?”

lifting her chin she said “Yep, I’m way tougher than when we got here.”

“You sure are, heck we both are, look at me, I’m almost skinny.” Gracefully moving my hands out into a “look at me” gesture.

“Oh and watch this!” Yamina crowed, and began to shrink back to her original fire fly size and back up to her new size, about that of a extra large sized moth, maybe 3 inches total. “I can shift anywhere in my current size range, and my gear shifts with me. I told you Devas -were- magic!”

“Very cool!” I said, not faking a bit of my admiration. “That will come in way handy, like sneaking through keyholes. Do you think you can do that exploration pass, while I deal with my messages and spend my CP from last night?”

She perked up instantly, “Sure, no problem!’ and she zoomed off into the sky. That kid had some crazy energy, when she controlled it, instead of it controlling her, she was going to be hell on wheels.

I settled in and spent time working on my interface. Ok a tab for Systems messages, one for quests, one for skill, Cp, stat and other gains. A long screen for party and other chats, with sorting and searching. Then I dug really hard into the big one. Quests.

I dug in deep, Ripping off every good GUI idea from every game I’d ever played. Sort, filter linking quest to navigation, colored damage numbers, ever thing. Steve Barcia, the designer of the Master of Orion games, used to say something like “Rip off every good idea you can find first, Once you have that, you’re already the best. Then and only then, innovate.”

I thought a few moment more, but couldn’t think of anything else important. Accepting I’d probably think of more later, I stopped modifying my GUI. Suddenly realizing this was probably why the Goddess picked not only a gamer, a programmer and a Scadian but an ex game developer as well. Oh I didn’t’ tell you that? Yeah, I spent my 20s and early 30s as a game programmer and game designer for several of the big names in the industry. I quit when My wife and I got together, that kind of stressful overtime was just too hard on our relationship, I wanted to spend more time together. A little deflated, after thinking about my wife, I dug into my new messages I had waiting being grateful for delta or “show changes only mode”.

Oh wow, some of those skills are awesome, the Goddess didn’t lie when she said applying my old abilities and knowledge would result in rapid skill growth until they reached parity with my abilities in my world, What she didn’t’ say, was they would then get boosted by the magic and leveling systems. Not sure which of us earns a point for that, but it’s freaking awesome.

As to my points, I need 500cp for system looting, so I’m saving up for that. System looting was my top imperative.

Next, I wandered over to the black sand bar, in the curve of the river where it would through our Grove, I looked carefully at the river further away, and as expected, while there was black sand about, it was only bits here and there, this sandbar was total cheating on the goddesses part. Excellent.

I sat down and crossed my legs, my butt getting wet, and started using Concentrate and Shape to make small ingots of iron about the size of a smartphone and stack them in my inventory, then meditating, and repeating. I made about a dozen and then stopped.

Then I went and gathered up a bunch of the loose oak sticks I’d created the day before, and tried to use shape to convert them into charcoal. Alas, I wasn’t able to, that kind of change exceeded my current abilities. I tried Vibrating a corner of an ingot to make it red hot, but uncomfortably warm seemed to be about my limit.

I tossed the all branches in my inventory. Next, I converted one of the ingots into a buttcap, and another couple into a good sized hewing spear head, for my staff. because the spear head it was soft iron, and not steel as I’d hoped with the charcoal and iron, it was shorter heavier and thicker than I wanted, but it’s better than just a stick.

I thought about using the meteorite to make a iron nickel steel blade, but to really be good I need to migrate some carbon into it at well. High carbon nickel steel would be excellent.

I pulled up my message interface and added a crafting tab, move crafting specific output to it and took a look.

I then took a break and decided to work on another project. I really wanted either cloth, leather, or decent steel before I made any armor. Getting armor to not chafe cripplingly with nothing under it is harder than you’d think. I learned that the hard way.

I’d work on a buckler or a small shield to go with my waster tonight, I needed to get hunting, or I’d burn the whole day crafting.

I gathered a big bundle of sticks and converted them all into a couple dozen stakes about 1” around and 1 feet long, with a point on one end. That took me way longer than expected, I probably should have used them at whatever side they started, but hopefully this was good training for my shaping magic. Then I went to the edge of the river, and pounded the stakes into the river bottom , making a large circle of stakes fairly close together, with a v at the top pointing into the circle, the bottom of the v was left open just barely wide enough for a fish to fit through. What I had created was a quick and dirty primitive fish trap. This way while we were off hunting and gathering, we’d also be doing some passive fishing to gather dinner for later.

Since I had literally not eaten in a life time, even if that lifetime was only slightly over a day old, I knew I was going to need food. I wandered over to the fruit trees I’d seen on the map, and looked at what we had to work with. The wide area of short shaggy green grass led up to the trees and under. The entire area looked tended and the cleared of brush, The trees stood up like sloppy versions of the lollypop trees my kids had drawn in elementary school. There was like a small cluster of a couple of different apple varieties, not in straight lines like an orchard, random more like small ‘food forest. All of the trees seemed to be just by happenstance at full fruit. Judging by the volume of fruit on the trees they appear to have been properly pruned back this season. In other words, the trees were all heavy with apples. I cast ID on the nearest tree, and concentrated on getting as much info out of it as I could.

.

I then focused on one of the apples, and did it again

Oh crap, I guess we should have explored the grove like Danu said, instead of heading off hunting first thing. Sighing, I said “Point Danu, 5-2 , Goddesses favor”

Putting my hands on my hips I thought…Scoring more points for the home team was really being crippled by not having Divine Chat, I’m going to need to put that up right behind System Loot. This little game of one ups-man-ship might turn out to be a blessing if I started getting some point on the scoreboard. I was only getting points when the goddess was both talking to Yamina, and I got a good shot in. I’d never catch up like this.

I picked 5 apples from each of the 5 trees, for a total of 25, and started hiking back to the river to look for Yamina, The quartz outcropping was going to have to wait for later.

When I got to the river, Yamina was apparently playing “Try to Bite me” tag with the fish, zooming down an inch off the water, then back up to the sky. She clearly had Magic Bubble on, so I guess it wasn’t as dangerous as it looked at first, but still worried me.

“Hey Yamina, what’ca doing there?”

“Oh hey Bill, I was playing tag with the fish, and training my new Dodge skill that I earned yesterday, I’ve gotten it up to level 2.3. Plus its soooo much fun!” she said, zooming off to slalom along the water again and frustrating the fish.

“Props there youngin’, that looks like good fun and good training. Did you see anything interesting on your high altitude scouting before I look at the new map updates?”

“I saw the town mom mentioned, south of us, she was right, small village is the best descriptions, there are a couple farms around it, and a BUUUNCH of people working in the water, fishing I guess, and the smoke from the chimneys you could probably see from here if it weren’t’ for the trees.. A double handful of really small houses and stuff. Oh, you were right, the river runs north up into the hills, and rapidly after them is a super cool waterfall, off a cliff, maybe 6 of you tall, and it’s headwaters is a lake up on the top of the cliff. There was some stuff there I couldn’t make out, like maybe a building? If so it was super over grown. To the west it keeps getting drier quickly, we’re on the border of a fairly arid region.

“Hey that building sounds like an opportunity to do the Spread the Faith quest again, I was planning to hunt along the river today, north to the headwater, or south to the village.”

Yamina laughed out loud and said “I vote South, you desperately either need some pants or to buy the perks ‘6 pack abs’ and ‘Male Super Models Body!”

“Are those even real perks?”

“If not they should be! and with my mom’s sense of humor, if they weren’t before they probably are now!, Hey mom, Hey mom, can you add one, ‘America’s Ass’, that Cap’n USA guy is hot!”