The VR pod's view faded out from showing Sonia's airship. "Where the heck was I?" Stan asked to the void that replaced it. He'd been playing Thousand Tales a little just this morning, while riding a ship across the real Carribbean Sea to reach the seastead, but that now felt like ages ago. "Take me back to the Endless Isles, please."

The darkness gradually lifted to show a world of sea and sky. He now stood on the shore of Island West-3 South-10, a volcanic crag with a beach of black sand. Behind him, the Work In Progress lay at anchor. His simple one-masted boat had enough space on deck and in the tiny cabin for the three passengers he'd given a ride, plus a treasure chest he'd also made for himself. Now that he was in VR he waded closer, feeling water lap around his knees, to put one hand against the sun-warmed wooden hull. He smiled. This thing he'd made was real, within Ludo's world, and it was his.

Stan took out a flag from his inventory, a simple blue square on a stick, and stuck it into the ground. The interface announced, [You have discovered this island and can now save here!] If he found a suitable save crystal, that was. There was always a feeling of accomplishment to "discovering" a new island, even ones that'd been seen by thousands of other players. If all of their flags were visible to him he'd see the entire shore littered with them. Yet seeing his own standard fluttering on the beach by itself was true in its own way, because he really had marked out another square on his map, another place where he had a little more control over the rules.

He did the scanning gesture again, this time on himself. He'd earned some basic powers so far without actually killing a lot of monsters:

[Stan Cooper

PRIVATE INFO

Account type: Standard

Mind: Tier-III

Body: Element-Touched (Earth)

Main Skills: Smithing, Woodworking, Inspect, Merchant, Hammer

Talents: Pack Man, Gadget Inspector

Shamanic Magic 1: Growth, Metal, Create. 2: Tailwind.

Save Point: Tourney Isle

PUBLIC INFO

Note: Wielder of hammer and drones.

Class: Craftsman]

His talents so far let him carry extra stuff in his bags and make minor upgrades to items, powers that were useful both for trading and for building. Many other players favored powers that let them hit harder or run faster; they were missing out on the interesting ones.

Time to go seek some adventure. As usual he didn't have much armor, and the sparkling blue cloth he'd made into pants and a sail did nothing for his defense. What he needed today was a low-pressure trip. He called out to a party of wanderers who were just coming onshore. "Hey there! Need a pack mule while you're exploring the volcano?"

The trio hauled a raft onto the sand. The wood splintered and cracked, making Stan wince. All three looked like newbies, equipped with little more than wooden spears and bits of palm-bark armor that even Stan hadn't tried making. All were human but for one who'd earned the first stage of a birdman transformation, growing a fringe of gold feathers along his arms and hair.

The one girl in the party said, "Who are you, hanging around on a random island? Say, are you an uploader?"

Stan laughed. "Not yet. There aren't many of those. I just showed up to give people a ride in my new boat here and then I had to sign out."

"Sorry. It's just that you're way out away from the starting area too, and you obviously played enough to get that partial transformation."

Oh yeah, that. Stan glanced backward and saw the fuzzy, ringed tail he had in this world. In VR it felt like something twitching at the base of his spine, matching some faint flicking that hinted at the raccoon-like ears atop his head, but there was only so much that the gaming rig could do to simulate a different body shape. He was basically still human anyway despite being "element-touched" like the birdman, and wasn't sure he wanted to go any farther with those changes.

He said, "Fair enough, though your friend there obviously did the element thing himself. Speaking of giving rides, hang on a sec." He used a private message window to contact the group that he'd ferried here. [Sorry to strand you; I was offline. How are you doing?]

Their reply popped up as text: [We're on the northwest beach building a raft to get back to Tourney. Want to help?]

Stan relayed that to the newbies and added, "What brings you so far away from Central Island so soon? Most players get better equipped first. No offense."

The feathered one said, "We're sequence-breaking!" The girl explained for him, "Jumping ahead to get a cool ship early. And for that we need an Anchor Stone, which I guess you know, and for that we had to go far off."

The third guy said, "But yeah, let's find the other group."

Stan led the way. "This is a chance to learn, especially if you plan to build your own boat after this trip. I take it you're following a specific quest that said this island could give you that Anchor Stone you need?"

They talked for a bit. A new window popped up in Stan's vision in the distinctive shimmery blue of his sail and pants, like sunlight on water. [Are you seriously going to spend your VR time doing woodworking, again?]

Stan grinned. "Ocean, is that you?"

"Huh?" asked one of the adventurers.

"Sorry; I meant to say that privately. Ocean is the main supervisor AI of the Endless Isles. She's taunting me, so... Weapons ready for trouble!"

He'd called it: a pair of monsters bubbled up from the sea, conjured just because Ocean thought it appropriate. Not the shark-men he'd seen before, but black-and-white trollish creatures with long fluked tails and holding knives of colorful glass.

"Orcan!" said one of the experienced folk. "Get a tooth sample!"

How was Stan supposed to... oh. He grinned and took out his bronze hammer he'd built, then looked at the monsters' toothy snouts.

The battle began. The newbie explorers with their spears tried to fend the monsters off, but one orcan swung a segmented blade like a stained glass window that shattered the simple wood. The beast's own weapon shattered and it fell back, holding its webbed hands together in a magical pose that began to summon another knife.

While it was doing that, Stan leaped into the fray and swung underhand, connecting with the creature's jaw so hard that a tooth flew out. "There's your sample!"

The other orcan slashed at Stan, forcing him to parry twice with his hammer and dodge the third blow. Even so, it gashed him against his left arm. A red [Major wound!] icon flashed. The impact felt to Stan like getting hit in the arm and having it heat up, but it was a real enough sensation to make him stagger back and yelp.

The more experienced travelers closed in with their swords and a dart of magically flung gravel. The two orcan growled, emitting puffs of vapor from their blowholes. Each time they swung they usually inflicted a wound with their razor-sharp glass or damaged somebody's weapons or armor, but their own weapons broke each time. Soon the pair didn't have enough chances to re-summon more, so they resorted to punching with their meaty fists. Stan darted in and out of the fray to deal hammer blows or try to cover for the new guys.

At last both monsters dropped to the beach and died, squeaking pathetically. Stan was breathing hard from the effort. "Is everyone still alive? Good."

One of the new crew said, "We're disarmed, though. Except it looks like they dropped backup knives." The birdman had already begun searching the bodies and discovered that they'd left behind a knife each as treasure.

Stan said, "Cool, but those obviously won't last long. If you give me one to study, I'll make you some quick replacement weapons."

One of the elder group scooped up some of the black sand into a vial. "It'll be tough for you to do the volcano quest if you've got that minimal equipment."

"We know, we know. How are we supposed to do the quest now that the game's AI just wrecked what equipment we had?"

Stan grabbed a few likely-looking bits of driftwood and fallen branches from nearby palm trees. With a simple knife he began shaping them into clubs and a spear.

[Crafting result: Crude Wooden Spear. "Best point: it's pointy."]

Stan shrugged at the AI's criticism. "That's all I can do without a proper crafting station."

"Thanks," said the birdman, "but have we got any real chance?"

"They might get an easy version of the volcano dungeon," said the wizard who'd done that gravel-flinging spell and sampled the sand. "But if they're given the version that has a worthwhile treasure in it, then I wouldn't bet on them winning. I'd offer to help but that'd just scale up the difficulty."

The newcomers said, "That's not fair. We should be able to do this dungeon at any level."

Stan handed over the junky improvised weapons and took a glass knife. He said, "You shouldn't expect the Endless Isles to be fair. Random stuff happens all the time that could be good or bad. Instead, you need to be in control of how equipped and ready you are, so that you can get past something like this fight without getting worn down."

The wizard said, "Come on; let's all go back to Tourney and get you set up to try again with better odds. Stan, can you carry us all?"

"Sorry, no, max of four including me." There was only so much detail to the physics, and some limits were arbitrary.

"Blah. Can you help us do a quick raft, then?"

Stan nodded and they all got to work to make one. Stan did a lot of the work of laying out the fresh logs and connecting them with improvised rope, giving the whole thing a quality bonus due to his success in a little puzzle that was half abstract, half a real judgment of wood quality and balance. Then, reluctantly, he left the higher-level group behind in his wake to ferry the new guys east.

Besides using his limited knowledge of sailing to cross the sea -- mostly by pointing in the direction he wanted to go and adjusting the square sail until it Just Worked -- he had some magic. He struck a pose on the deck of the Work In Progress and called up the spell system with a gesture. A loose and rippling 3D grid of colorful points appeared around him. He opened one hand and conjured a rune that resembled a swirl of golden wind, then guided it along a spiral pattern through ghostly walls and spikes. His movements made him turn and dance in place to steer the mark to where he needed it, and then to guide another symbol for the word Create, and to target the combined energies. At last the magic field faded out and a gentle breeze began to blow from behind him, filling the sail more strongly than before. He smiled; he was getting better at this.

Stan's boat was faster than these disposable "noob rafts" that low-powered characters used to get around. He didn't need to chop down trees and lash them together every time he wanted to cross between islands, then have his creation sink. Instead, some durability meters on the thing slowly declined. And since he'd proven his commitment to the boat by installing a hard-win Anchor Stone, the little vessel was nearly impossible to destroy completely. Despite its speed as it crashed through the waves, it still took a long time to travel between West-3 South-10 and the town at Tourney Isle, just South-10.

Stan didn't mind. Here in VR he could feel the wind on his face and the way the creaking deck shifted beneath his feet with every wave. Seagulls circled overhead and the sun slipped slowly behind him.

"Wait. How long have I been in here?"

[Two hours, six minutes.]