Jen looked into the rings of holding as she texted, “Getting jumped by a bunch of blood thirsty bandits was a pretty shitty start to this new world, but glass half full: we did receive some useful loot. The three rings of holding we got off the bandits feel like they are going to be real life savers, and we can disguise ourselves with the clean clothes they had stored in the rings.”

Jen reached towards Sam and said, “Let me take a look at your ring for a second.” She looked into each one of the rings again, pushed her mana through her channels as she focused for her on-board computer to sort and inventory all the items in the rings.

Jen’s face turned real excited, and she texted, “Heyyyyy, you won’t believe this, when I pushed my on-board laptop to store the inventory data – it stored it, but if feels like it is stored straight into my mind. I can literally recall every single item that we have down to the bullet, without even trying, It’s just there. Oh, I just got a new skill notice.”

==

Skill: Inventory, Novice – level 2

Most never learn this skill even exists, but apparently you are an anal-retentive list maker!

==

Jen thought “that’s fucking weird,” as she read the insult, but then her face went white for a second when she noticed her inventory did not include any of their tech, but instead an enormous list of “slag metal.” She pulled out the bag with the tech gear. Sam had removed all batteries, drained all power from the equipment, brought solar panels, a manual generator, and battery rechargers.

Jen was feeling physically sick. She had just been thinking about getting the drones out and sending them off to do some recon, but as she unloaded the contents of the bag on the ground, EVERTHING that was in any way electronic was slag, useless metal and plastic.

She was throwing a silent temper tantrum and having an emotional break-down as she thought, “All my tech is gone. My psych skill is basically useless without tech. I’m in some medieval backwoods magic barbarian world; I’ll never get to build a Mech suit, we had to kill some bandits, and now we are hiding to stay alive.”

Just at that moment, Jen actually thought more about the act of killing the bandits. It made her want to vomit, feel immense guilt, and hollow inside, all at the same time. She thought to herself, “What if they weren’t barbarians or bandits, but just people trying to survive, and we appeared out of nowhere surprising them, and they thought they were being attacked.”

Jen really started to spiral down, but then she remembered the bandits would have seen the rainbow and would have known they were clearly just teleporting in. Jen was able to maintain her sanity when she realized the bandits… definitely bandits, must have been spawn camping people arriving from Earth.

Jen took a few more moments to herself before crawling forward to lie next to Sam.

Sam could see the distraught look in her eyes, and knew she was having a difficult time. Jen messaged Sam with a summary of their inventory, “All our tech is slag metal.”

“What? Slag metal— What do you mean?

“Yea, anything that contained any type of electronic component is fried like it had been hit with a lightning surge, without a surge protector.”

Sam now understood why Jen looked so miserable, and said, “Damnit! I was really hoping the work we put into draining the power from all the tech would pay off. Thank god our weapons still function!”

“True, we need to try and look on the bright side. My inventory list of the loot and our gear also includes some shit swords and hammers, or I guess they could be good for this world, but they are useless to us. Neither of us know how to effectively use an axe or sword in a battle against anyone skilled. We also have some local clothing. We looted a total of 12 silver and 80 copper, but I don’t know how much that will buy here. That leaves us with the two M-4 5.56 assault rifles with 3,000 rounds, one 380 bodyguard with 94 rounds left after killing the bandits, one magazine fed 308 with 1,000 rounds, two Springfield 45 calibers with 1,000 rounds, 2-22 caliber rifles with 5000 rounds, 2 12-guage pump shotguns with 500 shells, two sets of level 3 torso body armor, one crossbow with 40 bolts, a medical kit, and a pack of 50 small chem lights.”

“Damn, we’re lucky we recovered these space rings” Sam said again trying to cheer Jen up. “You saw the message ‘With Great Risks come Great Rewards’, and I know you love functional jewelry like these rings” he teased continuing to try and bring her spirits back up.

Jen tried to smile back but then explained she thought the bandits were waiting to ambush or “spawn camping” people arriving from earth.

Sam’s only response was, “Mother Fuckers!”

Sam received his ring back from Jen, and after they both kept watch in silence for a while just letting their circumstances sink in, he messaged, “What do you think about the quest?”

Jen shrugged, “I don’t want to gamble any of my ability points, but it would be nice to have a map. We don’t have to make a decision now, so let’s just put a pin in that until we get fully rested and our mana fully charged up. We both only have about 4 mana in our system right now, so I estimate it’ll be another 13 to 15 hours before we are fully charged up.”

Sam nodded, “I agree. I don’t know how long the days and nights are in this world, but I really want to be able to use our night vision enhancement when it gets dark.”

“Me too,” Jen agreed. “It feels like we arrived in the early morning based on how the position of the sun has moved since we arrived here. That assumes we are on a planet, and there isn’t more than one sun. Ugh…it’s a waste of time to keep going down that rabbit hole right now.”

Sam snorted in frustration with all the unknowns of the world they were dropped into, and said, “Yeah, let’s just keep rolling with punches one minute at a time. Let me try something.”

Sam pulled out a small stack of the forgetme charms he had made back on earth, and said, “Like I was just thinking, they have all been drained of the mana I stored in them. Actually, that’s not correct, I can feel just a sliver of mana remaining. That actually makes some sense, because otherwise I think they would have become brittle and broke apart.”

“That’s as good a theory as any right now. Hey, try charging one of the charms and see how much of your mana is used.”

Sam held the charm in his hand as he focused on his mana infusing the metal for about 5 seconds, and said, “Looking at my stats; I think it took about ¼ point of mana.”

Jen sighed with relief, “Not great, but much better than my worst expectations. Crap! I just realized our psychic mental texting has been drawing on our mana pool. OK, let’s go through our skills and determine the mana draw of each. First, I’m going to activate my night vision just for a few minutes to determine its mana draw.”

After watching Jen test her night vision, Sam messaged, “Do you think we will have enough mana by nighttime?”

Jen shrugged, “I also just now checked our psych texting function, and it costs next to no mana, so….we can use it as much as we want. If the nighttime on this world is 10 hours or less, and we rotate watch, I think the night vision skill would cost us each about 5 mana. After you get to five mana, I want you to start charging up the forgetme charms. Also, earlier, while I was going through the inventory, I sensed the emotions of some large beasts that felt like they were pretty far away, but if they get close, we should do our best to avoid getting their attention.”

“Good plan, Boss,” Sam replied as he adjusted slightly while still keeping his eyes on the transfer pad.