Over the next few days he played the game whenever he had free time. He crafted a driftwood club, caught some fish to earn money, commuted to the next island to the east, and finally convinced a shell-clad shaman to give him a magic flag. At Island East-1 Stan tried to use it, driving it into the beach to establish a permanent right to save his game here, but the command didn't work. Instead, a window popped up asking him what design he wanted to use for his flag. A library of heraldic stuff was available.

Stan blinked at it. He had no idea. "Can I change it later?" he said. Yes, said the game. "Just use the default." The first listed design was the Thousand Tales logo.

His character went through the motion of planting the flag, and it unfurled to show white with the letters "TBD". No other flags were visible; apparently it was everyone's island and each player's flags were hidden to make every claim a personal victory.

He touched a hovering blue save crystal on that island to make it the place he'd appear on the next login, not just after dying within one session. He'd achieved something. What now, though?

He slept on the question. At work the next day he was setting up drip-irrigation systems with buried pipes, a skill he'd been developing because it was a job nobody else seemed to like. It was too much like regular ditch-digging, and everybody else wanted to be a professor, a bureaucrat or a scientist. Stan didn't much care for the job either. His goal was to get through his mandatory volunteer years, go right to a trade school instead of a four-year college, then have an easy career off-and-on while living on Basic Income. He'd have plenty of time for gaming.

In Thousand Tales, though, he could do whatever he wanted. It didn't matter that he was a fatherless kid under the care of a Community boss who cared what he ate and what he did for fun. In there, he could be somebody. He just had to keep his eyes open for opportunities.

Rather than get involved in the tradition of pretending to be the Chosen One and vanquishing evil, he hired himself out as a club-wielding backup goon. Low-level adventurers paid him a little to help them slay fishmen and cave spiders and the like. Stan was happy to let those guys take all the glory for "saving" NPC villages from monster tribes that constantly respawned, while Stan himself gained skills and silver pieces.

One night, he was on Island East-2 South-3 by himself, practicing the Cartography skill by wielding a hand-made surveying instrument, when a ship appeared from the south. Not like the pathetic raft Stan had so far, but a classic two-masted sailing ship with a couple of generic NPC crewmen tending the ropes. Stan whistled toward them. The ship seemed to be heading his way anyhow.

On deck were a standard swordsman/wizard/rogue team, though in their case it was more musketeer/shaman/pirate. The scurvy sea-dog called out, "Ahoy! What's up?"

"Do you need another hand? Or can you give me and my raft a trip back to Central Island?"

The ship edged closer to shore and dropped anchor. The musketeer said, "Sorry, no. We're just here to dump some --"

"Don't tell him, doofus," the shaman said. "Now we have to bury the loot someplace else."

The musketeer said, "Dude, it's vendor trash. Who cares if he steals it?"

Stan called out to the ship, "I can hear you, you know."

The three argued until the pirate silenced them. "You there. We've got a load of junk that's barely worth shipping back to Central Island. Want to buy it?"

"Great sales pitch," the shaman told him.

Stan said, "Like what?"

The pirate said, "Monster claws, shark teeth, lizard hide, rusty cutlasses, you name it. If a weak monster or a low-level treasure chest had it, we've got it. We were going to sail back and sell it, but it'd be better if we could dump the stuff and get on with something more fun."

Stan looked the adventurers over, fiddling with the camera settings to scroll the screen over to them. From what he could tell without having much practice at appraisal/scanning powers, they were middling powerful, past the phase of a fantasy hero's career where he still cares about selling every soggy napkin and rat tail he collects. "You said it's worthless junk, but I could take it off your hands."

After quick negotiation between ship and shore, Stan rowed his raft out to them and took on two wooden chests of garbage. Really, the chests themselves were worth as much as their contents. Stan saluted and paid with most of his silver coins. Once the adventurers' ship had sailed back south for more exciting deeds than dumping the loot, Stan started his raft moving back to the starting island and looked through his new inventory. There wasn't an explicit value for any of it, but he'd learned a little about how alchemy and other crafting skills worked around here. If there was an item with no uses, the game's built-in GM would let someone find one.

Back at Central Island he headed for Mystria's Market, a medieval-style set of wooden shopping stalls run by a cloaked figure with glowing gold eyes. It was sunset in the Isles and hardly anyone was about except for a thief trying to skulk his way into a shop. Stan shouted for the guards, who ran the guy off with surprisingly little fanfare. Stan had kind of expected a quest to come from that.

Instead of an adventure, he found a NPC shopkeeper in the one block of stores that was open. It was easy to tell from the fact that the keeper was wearing generic poofy merchant clothes with only color differences from his neighbors. Working with NPCs meant very basic interaction, little more than a dumb computer interface... unless you did something to wake the system up and draw attention from higher minds.

The question was whether he wanted to keep his head down and rack up more imaginary coins, or risk "interesting times".

Stan glanced at his clock. Though it was evening in-game, the real world was dark and quiet. He really ought to be sleeping. There was dull farm work ahead, and more dull, predictable but easy time beyond that. Why would he want to make a chore out of the game, too?

He told the shopkeeper, "I want to sell you some basic crafting ingredients -- tomorrow. I'm thinking of starting a regular business in low-level bulk items." He yawned. "For now, I'm headed out." He retreated around a corner to where no one would see him, and logged off. He'd give the hidden game-master time to decide how to handle him.

#

When he next got to play, his inventory was still cluttered and he had the treasure chests in secure storage at a warehouse called Davy Jones'. He returned to the shopkeeper and saw an unusual smile on the NPC's face.

The merchant said, "I don't much want twelve dozen assorted monster chunks, but I do want potions and weapon parts. Have you thought about taking up crafting?"

Stan had looked into it. The trouble was that learning to make, say, potions required practice, which meant burning through a lot of junk like his current collection. The alchemy interface was a mix of on-screen dials and meters to click at the right moment for maximum points, a traditional puzzle game, and some actual skill that involved matching ingredients to a fantasy element profile. Similarly, cooking involved adding ingredient X that would raise the food's Spicy and Salty level, then toning down Spicy with ingredient Y that also dropped Sour too low, and so on. His one attempt at scroll-crafting had generated a Crumpled Paper item.

He said, "Yes, but for now I want to make some money and expand, not expend." He wondered what the game's speech processor would make of that.

After a moment the clerk said, "I think you mean, you want to sell the items directly? Here's my price for the inventory you listed." A window came up with a disappointing number, not much more than he'd paid the adventurers.

Stan minimized the game and brought up a Web browser instead. As with every other popular game there was a fan wiki with articles about the rules. He browsed the pages about crafting again. If he tried smithing he could craft some weapon handles from lizard bones, armor plate sections from turtle shells or scales, and the ever-popular Armored Coconut Bra from the dangerous migrating coconuts. This load of stuff would be a money-loser but he'd have more skill next time. Or...

He flipped back to the game. "I have a better idea. Thanks."

He walked to the Maker Workshop. Like some real-world places, it was a co-op facility with item crafting equipment. Instead of saws and circuitry, of course, it was more focused on crystals and cauldrons.

He walked in and found a bunch of people (of assorted species) at work. He said, "Anybody here need some alchemy practice ingredients?"

By selling right to the crafters, he easily made more than the merchant would've offered him, and still had some inventory left over. "Just back from a trip?" asked a wizard who'd bought four frog eyeballs.

"I just bought what some actual adventurers didn't want."

"Huh. A gleaner."

"What?"

"Like guys who used to pick up leftover crops that the harvesters missed. I was about to explore Phantom Isle to the north. If you stick around while my party does that, I'll likely have more garbage like this to sell you so I can carry the good stuff."

Stan said, "When you put it that way, how can I refuse?"