Part of me hated asking Sam questions. That was the part of me that wanted a good night’s sleep and didn’t like physical and mental pain. Then there was the part of me that wanted to ask the guy a ton of questions. That was the part of me that wanted to learn what was going on. But, honestly, the part of me that wanted to know would end up losing the battle kind of soon if there had been a way to ask more than one question. As it was, I saw that I needed to learn, so it was pain.

When I woke up or came to being or whatever it is called, when you first realized that you were in a dream, I was in the office again. I expected that I’ll never see any place other than this office when I was brought to Sam for an answer. His office was so stuffed that I was quite surprised to find that he had managed to find a corner in which he could’ve had me appear. It reminded me quite nicely of the corners that my nose would be put in when I was in primary school. It was odd thinking about home when I was stuck here looking at good wood paneling. I was in trouble a lot as a kid, in and out of different homes, unwanted because I had too much imagination and wouldn’t take crap from anyone. Never did find out who my parents were; I just remembered the first time I was picked up by a cop and taken to a shelter. Even those places had nothing on how messed up Sam was. Even with my nose in the corner, that stupid tick was going on, not even letting me remember bad times without getting interrupted.

My childhood was a mess. Never parents around to teach me what I should’ve learned, like how to get along with other people. I retreated into books to hide from the pain around me and would lash out at those who crossed lines that only I knew. It was kind of weird thinking about it now; most of those lines were things that later would serve me well. I didn’t take to being told how to accomplish a task if I knew how to do it; sure, tell me to do it but don’t tell me how. Then there were also the misplaced morals that people tried to put on me. Women told me as a boy; how men were to act, being told that if I did x or y, the ladies would like me. All of it was false, the girls in school liked me enough as a friend at school, but I was just a smart, nice kid who tried not to cause problems. Being kind and courteous got me a lot of girls who smiled and said hi, but none that wanted to date me. I’d say that I was too shy, but honestly, shy was the wrong type of word to use, I put myself out there, but the girls never seemed to understand when I was showing interest. I did all the right things, small gifts, holding doors, helping out, looking at them in the eyes, and listening to them talk about whatever was bothering them. None of them seemed to understand that all of this was me following the rules that I was told would get me a girlfriend. Turned out that I was just being taught to be a nice guy and not a guy.

Yet nowhere on a different planet where there was magic, and I was practically a caveman, I was alone. Sure I had Sam and his study where I could get an answer that may or may not help, and I had a pet that I could talk to, but I was alone. So while a large part of me liked it, I also knew that it was terrible to be by myself long-term.

Even as a kid reading books all the time, I knew that it was bad to be by myself. Sure I hated talking with people and would instead read a book. Large groups of people stressed me out, and my best days were when I was hiking by myself or hanging in a hammock reading. Yet, deep inside, I knew that I needed someone to talk with, and I needed a group of people to help share the workload. I needed to find people, and I needed to find them soon.

Yes, my waterfall was great, but there were goblins around me that I didn’t want to deal with by myself. I liked having a garden and enjoyed hunting but doing it to stay alive wasn’t the same joy as just doing it.

Right when I started to get into organizing, I heard Sam clear his throat and start speaking, “The requirements to raise your class change per level. But, to start with to raise your class level you must raise all your class skills to level 1, or you can substitute one of your secondary class skills at double the level requirements.”

As he said that, the corner my nose was in the whole night backed away a few feet. I thought I would see something else until I accelerated directly toward the corner and hit it.

I bolted up and slammed my face into the top of my lean-to and shoved my left arm through the branches scraping it all the way. As that happened, Blink, who was in her normal place, once again used my face as a climbing post and went up and over me, hissing and doing a throat rumble all the way. I was awake and had taken damage, and it was now morning.

I looked behind me and saw that Princess Blink had taken her royal prerogative to have a lay in this morning and was curled back in the middle of my bed of fir and fur. While she was cute, I’d have to say that her habit of clawing at me was one that I didn’t care for one bit.

Since I was up, I took care of the problem of the bleeding and then got to thinking. Sam had told me that to get my stats to level up, I needed to level up my Class; to do that, I needed to level up my class skills. Yet, the problem that I had was that I’d two skills that were locked to me. My Script skill and my Ancient Languages skill. Both of these were locked because I couldn’t read even though I read the message telling me that I couldn’t read.

It appeared, at least until I found a person who could teach me to read, that I wasn’t going to level, so that meant that I needed to work on the skills I’d so that I could figure out a way to defend against the goblins. My morning went about as planned. I got up and did all my normal things of breakfast and skills training. While I wasn’t getting levels every day of training, I could feel that I was doing things better, so I knew it would only be a matter of time before I saw more notifications.

I changed up my plan of defense after I’d seen the little monsters. They lived more than three hours away, and I figured it might be better if I spent the effort to shore up my local defense more than try to capture or kill scouts. The main reason for this change was that there were so many of them, and it didn’t appear that they scouted; they just went. I’d have to be careful, but I had a feeling that I’d be able to move about mostly alright for the time being.

I spent the day adding in a field trap as I came to think of the shifting rocks right up to in front of my waterfall. As soon as you came into sight, I started the field. There would be a path for me to get through, but I figured that would be a small passage that they were unlikely to find. The idea I’d was if they came at me at night, then I’d hear them coming from broken bones and yelling.

It wouldn’t be a fight I wanted, but it was one that I would try to be ready for. I also would build in more tiger pits. My hope was between the warning field and the pits, I could mostly stay safe. I also would make lots of light spears that I could throw. I knew that they were javelins, but in my mind, I kept calling them throwing spears. I wanted to start with the idea of the new spear being a sub-skill of spear so that I’d get some benefit from the spear skill.

I also knew that for my home, I would need to look into smoothing out the walls going up. It was something that would take time, but if I could even smooth the first ten feet or so, then they would have less to grab when coming after me. I’d really like walls and people guarding me, but that was all out of the question right now.

After I worked on the shifting stones for the afternoon, Blink chose to leave them be, which was nice of her since I didn’t want to have to repeat the process of putting them in again. She and I had a nice dinner of unnt and fish with some roasted veggies, and we headed to bed. I was still pondering over everything that Sam had told me, so I made no plans of asking another question. At this point, I knew that I would need to work hard to develop the skills I’d, and also, I needed to be smart in how I combated the goblins. I wasn’t going to be able to take them head-on right now because of how many of there were, so it meant that I truly did need to plan. As I was falling asleep, I knew the most important thing was for me to level my skills.